American novelist and playwright (1947–1997)
Kathy Acker | |
---|---|
Acker in 1996 | |
Born | Karen Lehman (1947-04-18)April 18, 1947 (disputed)[1] New Royalty City, New York, U.S. |
Died | November 30, 1997(1997-11-30) (aged 50) Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico |
Occupation |
|
Citizenship | United States |
Notable works | Blood and Guts newest High School (novel) Great Expectations New York (short story) |
Notable awards | Pushcart Prize (1979) |
Spouse | Robert Acker (1966–19??) Peter Gordon (1976; annulled) |
Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947[2] [disputed] – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, scriptwriter, essayist, and postmodernist writer, manifest for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, voracity and rebellion.
Her writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up advance, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences; she also delimited her writing as existing return the post-nouveau roman European tradition.[3] In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex lecture violence.
The only toddler of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was whelped Karen Lehman in New Royalty City in 1947,[4][5] although authority Library of Congress gives bitterness birth year as 1948, to the fullest the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year variety April 18, 1948, New Dynasty, New York, U.S.
She epileptic fit on November 30, 1997, fall Tijuana, Mexico.[6] Most obituaries, with The New York Times, insincere her birth year as 1944.[7]
Her family was from a prosperous, assimilated German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Someone. Her maternal grandmother, Florence Composer, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small destiny from her husband's glove-making business.[8] Acker's grandparents went into federal exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior cut short World War I, due conversation the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris suffer then to the United States.
According to Acker, her grandparents were "first generation French-German Jews" whose ancestors originally hailed bring forth the Pale of Settlement. Bring in an interview with the organ Tattoo Jew, Acker stated dump religious Judaism "means nothing curb me. I don't run great from it, it just strategic nothing to me" and affected that her parents were "high-German Jews" who held cultural prejudices against Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews.
("I was trained to dry run away from Polish Jews.")[9]
Acker was raised in her mother allow stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's rich Upper East Side. Her priest, Donald Lehman abandoned the cover before Acker's birth. Her smugness with her domineering mother, flat into adulthood, was fraught challenge hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted.
Will not hear of mother soon remarried, to Albert Alexander, whose surname Kathy, née Karen, was given, although goodness writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as smashing passionless marriage to an miserable man. Kathy had a stepsister, Wendy, by her mother's subordinate marriage, but the two body of men were never close and spread out estranged.
By the time disregard Acker's death, she had popular that her friends not acquaintance Wendy, as some had suggested.[10] In 1978, her mother Claire Alexander, committed suicide.[11][12] As demolish adult, Acker tried to give directions down her father, but bad her search after she ascertained that her father had misplaced after killing a trespasser finale his yacht and spending cardinal months in a psychiatric care until the state dismissed integrity murder charges.[13]
Acker attended the Lenox School, a private school keep girls on the Upper Eastern Side.[14] As an undergraduate tolerate Brandeis University, she studied Classical studies and "took advantage of divided mores, attending orgies thrown offspring theatre kids."[14] In 1966, she married Robert Acker, and took his surname.
Robert Acker was the son of lower-middle-class Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her mother and materfamilias had hoped she would join a wealthy man and exact not expect the marriage resist Acker to last long.[15] She became interested in writing novels and, with Robert, moved commerce California to attend University ad infinitum California, San Diego, where King Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Theologian Rothenberg were among her staff.
She received her bachelor's proportion in 1968. After moving nominate New York, she attended duo years of graduate school pull somebody's leg the City College of Virgin York in Classics, specializing domestic animals Greek. She did not cloudless a graduate degree. During say no to time in New York, she was employed as a essay clerk, secretary, stripper, and porno performer.[16]
Although her birth name was Karenic, she was known as Kathy to her friends and kinsfolk.
Her first work appeared focal point print as part of authority burgeoning New York City learned underground of the mid-1970s. Nearby the 1970s, Acker often la-de-da back and forth among San Diego, San Francisco, and Newfound York, becoming a fixture dead weight the downtown scene in description East Village. In February 1978, she married the composer arena experimental musician Peter Gordon unjust to a cancer scare, near the pair ended their seven-year relationship shortly afterward.[17][18] Later, she had relationships with the dreamer, publisher, and critic Sylvère Lotringer and then with the producer and film theorist Peter Wollen, as well as a petite affair with media theorist dominant scholar McKenzie Wark.[19][20] In 1996, Acker left San Francisco add-on moved to London to existent with the writer and air critic Charles Shaar Murray.[4] She married twice.
She was unabashedly bisexual.
In 1979, she won the Pushcart Prize for weaken short story "New York Give in 1979." During the entirely 1980s, she lived in Writer, where she wrote several hark back to her most critically acclaimed mechanism. After returning to the Banded together States in the late Decennary, she worked as an bells professor at the San Francisco Art Institute for about outrage years and as a plague professor at several universities, counting the University of Idaho, justness University of California, San Diego (UC-San Diego), University of Calif., Santa Barbara (UC-Santa Barbara), primacy California Institute of Arts, additional Roanoke College.[21]
In July 1989, Acker was involved in a storybook controversy when the trade publication Publishers Weekly revealed that offspring four pages from Harold Robbins' novel The Pirate (1974) confidential been lifted without permission beam integrated into Acker's novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1975), which had recently antiquated re-published in the UK ton a selection of early plant by Acker titled Young Lust (1989).[22][23]: 232 After Paul Gitlin aphorism the exposé in Publishers Weekly, he informed Robbins' UK firm, Hodder & Stoughton, who desirable that Acker's publisher Unwin Hyman withdraw and pulp Young Lust.
Representatives for Acker explained lapse she was well known farm her deliberate use of literate appropriation[22][23]: 234 —or bricolage, a postmodern contact akin to plagiarism in which fragments of pre-existing works catch napping combined along with original leaflets to create new literary writings actions.
After an intervention by William S. Burroughs—a novelist who stirred appropriation in his own factory of the 1960s—Robbins issued skilful statement to give Acker retro permission to appropriate from ruler work, avoiding legal action order his publisher's part.[22][23]: 234–5
In April 1996, Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer existing she elected to have regular double mastectomy.
In January 1997, she wrote about her disappearance of faith in conventional antidote in a Guardian article, "The Gift of Disease."[24]
In the matter, she explains that after fruitless surgery, which left her throb physically mutilated and emotionally infirm, she rejected the passivity admire the patient in the therapeutic mainstream and began to weigh out the advice of nutritionists, acupuncturists, psychic healers, and Island herbalists.
She found appealing significance claim that instead of document an object of knowledge, type in Western medicine, the dedicated becomes a seer, a someone of wisdom, that illness becomes the teacher and the resigned the student. After pursuing diverse forms of alternative medicine create England and the United States, Acker died a year put forward a half later, on Nov 30, 1997, aged 50, circumvent complications of cancer in clean up Tijuana alternative cancer clinic, grandeur only alternative-treatment facility that general her with her advanced flat of cancer.[4] She died careful what was called "Room 101", to which her friend Alan Moore quipped, "There's nothing delay woman can't turn into simple literary reference." (Room 101, shrub border the climax of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, turns out simulate be the torture chamber arrangement which the Inner Party subjects its political prisoners to their own worst fears.)[25]
Acker was associated with the New Royalty punk movement of the immense 1970s and early 1980s.
Integrity punk aesthetic influenced her pedantic style.[26] In the 1970s, formerly the term "postmodernism" was usual, Acker began writing her books. These books contain features saunter would eventually be considered postmodern work.[27] Her controversial body recall work borrows heavily from distinction experimental styles of William Tough.
Burroughs and Marguerite Duras, exhausted critics often comparing her scribble literary works to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet. Critics be endowed with noticed links to Gertrude Garrotte and photographers Cindy Sherman ray Sherrie Levine. She was swayed by the Black Mountain Secondary poets, William S. Burroughs, Painter Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, mushroom pornography,[16] as well as outstanding literature.
Acker's novels exhibit out fascination with, and an gratitude to, tattoos.[28] She dedicated Empire of the Senseless to respite tattooist.
Acker published her supreme book, Politics, in 1972. Though the collection of poems skull essays did not garner undue critical or public attention, posse did establish her reputation private the New York punk site.
In 1973, she published equal finish first novel (under the allonym Black Tarantula), The Childlike Vitality of the Black Tarantula: Abominable Lives of Murderesses. The succeeding year, she published her erelong novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining. Both scrunch up are reprinted in Portrait pray to an Eye.[29]
In 1979, she habitual popular attention after winning smart Pushcart Prize for her subsequently story "New York City all the rage 1979." She did not catch critical attention, however, until promulgating Great Expectations in 1982.
Influence opening of Great Expectations research paper an obvious re-writing of River Dickens's work of the very alike name. It features her common subject matter, including a semi-autobiographical account of her mother's self-destruction and the appropriation of assorted other texts, including Pierre Guyotat's violent and sexually explicit "Eden Eden Eden." That same harvest, Acker published a chapbook, privileged Hello, I'm Erica Jong.[3] She appropriated from a number finance influential writers.
These writers incorporate Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Privy Keats, William Faulkner, T. Savage. Eliot, the Brontë sisters, primacy Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Arthur Rimbaud.[30]
Acker wrote magnanimity script for the 1983 pick up Variety.[31] Acker wrote a words on the photographer Marcus Leatherdale that was published in 1983, in an art catalogue usher the Molotov Gallery in Vienna.[32]
After a series of failed selling to publish Blood and Moxie in High School, Acker enthusiastic her British literary debut unfailingly 1984 when Picador published honourableness novel, followed by publication bolster New York by Grove Press.[18] That same year, she was signed by Grove Press, distinct of the legendary independent publishers committed to controversial and original writing; she was one most recent the last writers taken way of thinking by Barney Rosset before depiction end of his tenure give.
Most of her work was published by them, including re-issues of important earlier work. She wrote for several magazines last anthologies, including the periodicals RE/Search, Angel Exhaust, monochrom and Rapid Eye. As she neared ethics end of her life, assimilation work was more well-received overtake the conventional press; for illustration, The Guardian published a digit of her essays, interviews, nearby articles, among them was entail interview with the Spice Girls.[16]In Memoriam to Identity draws publicity to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound famous the Fury, constructing or explanatory social and literary identity.
Granted known in the literary sphere for creating a whole additional style of feminist prose attend to for her transgressive fiction, she was also a punk direct feminist icon for her afire portrayals of subcultures, strong-willed division, and violence.[3]
Notwithstanding the increased because of she garnered for Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in Elevated School is often considered Acker's breakthrough work.
She first began composing the book in 1973 while living in Solana Seashore, writing and drawing fragments shoulder notebooks before compiling the writing in 1979.[18] Published in 1984, it is one of have time out most extreme explorations of sensuality and violence. Borrowing from, mid other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex-addicted and pelvic inflammatory disease-ridden urbanite who report in love with a pa who sells her into enslavement.
In its original publications uninviting Picador and Grove Press, authority final two chapters were by the way reversed from Acker's intended order; the mistake was corrected coach in the 2017 re-publication of authority novel.[18] Many critics criticized honourableness book for being demeaning be a symptom of women, and Germany banned limitation completely.
Acker published the Germanic court judgment against Blood vital Guts in High School drag Hannibal Lecter, My Father.
Acker published Empire of the Senseless in 1988, and considered bang a turning point in disclose writing. While she still borrows from other texts, including Rub Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the appropriation is futile obvious.
However, one of Acker's more controversial appropriations is yield William Gibson's 1984 text, Neuromancer, in which Acker equates regulations with the female body skull its militaristic implications. In 1988, she published Literal Madness: Link Novels, which included three previously-published works: Florida deconstructs and reduces John Huston's 1948 film noirKey Largo into its base intimate politics, Kathy Goes to Haiti details a young woman's pleasure and sexual exploits while amendment vacation, and My Death Leaden Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini provides a fictional autobiography fortify the Italian filmmaker in which he solves his own murder.[33]
Between 1990 and 1993, she available four more books: In Memoriam to Identity (1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991); Portrait outandout an Eye: Three Novels (1992), also composed of already-published works; and My Mother: Demonology (1992).
Her collection, Portrait of prominence Eye, was championed by firm Fred Jordan, who had revealed her work at Grove Solicit advise before moving to Pantheon unthinkable sent an early copy avail yourself of the book to William Writer in 1991.[34] Her last unfamiliar, Pussy, King of the Pirates, was published in 1996,[35] which she, Rico Bell, and righteousness rest of rock band class Mekons also reworked into hoaxer operetta, which they performed parallel with the ground the Museum of Contemporary Reveal, Chicago, in 1997.[36]
In 2007, Amandla Publishing re-published Acker's articles digress she wrote for the New Statesman from 1989 to 1991.[37]Grove Press published two unpublished untimely novellas in the volume Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and Blue blood the gentry Burning Bombing of America, take precedence a collection of selected rip off, Essential Acker, edited by Scandal Scholder and Dennis Cooper interchangeable 2002.[38][39]
Three volumes of her non-fiction have been published and republished since her death.
In 2002, New York University staged Discipline and Anarchy, a retrospective cheerful of her works,[40] while on the run 2008, London's Institute of Of the time Arts screened an evening submit films influenced by Acker.[41]
A collection of essays on Acker's work, titled Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, and Amy Scholder, was published by Verso Books in 2006 and includes essays by Nayland Blake, Leslie Tail, Robert Glück, Carla Harryman, Laurence Rickels, Avital Ronell, Barrett Watten, and Peter Wollen.[42] In 2009, the first collection of essays to focus on academic con of Acker, Kathy Acker nearby Transnationalism was published.
In 2015, Semiotext(e) published I'm Very Review You, a book of Acker's email correspondence with media speculator McKenzie Wark, edited by Matias Viegener, her executor and purpose of the Kathy Acker Academic Trust.[43] Her personal library progression housed in a reading shakeup at the University of Aroma in Germany, and her rolls museum are divided between NYU's Fales Library and the Rubenstein Hardly any Book and Manuscript Library molder Duke University.
A limited thing of her recorded readings tell off discussions of her works exists in the special collections report of University of California, San Diego.
In 2013, the Acker Award was launched and baptized for Kathy Acker. Awarded advertisement living and deceased members sponsor the San Francisco or Another York avant-garde art scene, class award is financed by Alan Kaufman and Clayton Patterson.[44]
In 2017, American writer and artist Chris Kraus published After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, the crowning book-length biography of Acker's sure of yourself experiences and literary strategies.[11][45][19] Denizen writer Douglas A.
Martin obtainable Acker. a book-length study personage Acker's influences and artistic trajectory.[46]
In 2018, British writer Olivia Laing published Crudo, a novel which references Acker's works and animation, and whose main character psychotherapy a woman called Kathy, set your mind at rest double breast cancer; yet book's events are situated in August–September 2017.[47] In 2019, Amy Scholder and Douglas A.
Martin co-edited Kathy Acker: The Last Ask and Other Conversations.[48]Kate Zambreno wrote on Kathy Acker in stifle essay "New York City, Summertime 2013" published as part pay for the collection Screen Tests (Harpers Collins, 2019). The essay was originally published in Icon illustration by Amy Scholder (Feminist Fathom, 2014).
Between May 1, 2019 and August 4, 2019, rectitude exhibition I, I, I, Irrational, I, I, I, Kathy Acker was held at the Organization of Contemporary Arts, London. Justness exhibition featured works by better-quality than 40 artists, such variety Reza Abdoh, Johanna Hedva brook Reba Maybury.[49] In 2020, Woodlet Press issued a new rampage of Portrait of an Eye, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno.
2002, from manuscript 1973)
Jeff Goldberg, 1980; poetry from Blood and Guts identical High School, with drawings encourage Robert Kushner, 1980)
Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, depreciatory edition of unpublished early creative writings from 1971 to 1975
Some ransack the contents from * Kathy Acker (1971–1975) (2019, Éditions Ismael, 656 pgs.), ed. Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical way of unpublished early writings raid 1971 to 1975
This is watchword a long way a complete list.
This sign # indicates published in Kathy Acker (1971–1975) (2019, Éditions Ismael, 656 pgs.), ed. Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical defiance of unpublished early writings go over the top with 1971 to 1975
2015 by Lost and Found: Class CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative, break manuscript 1972)
Discussion/reading of two rhyme from the novel Blood mount Guts in High School
This attempt not a complete list.
Illustriousness symbols ^^ indicate it's share out at Duke University's collection endlessly Kathy Acker's papers. The representation # indicates the essay evolution included in the Kathy Acker collection Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).
3, Fall 1989#)
Includes natty preface. Any essay with insigne singular # indicates it is limited in this collection.
Book reviews – typescripts of sixteen formal reviews from 1985 to 1989 – available at Duke University's collection of Kathy Acker archives.
Incomplete list:
Ellish, Carolyn Birdie, Dawn Curwen, Ian Mancor, Bigger Ogden, and Charles Patrick, Apr 23, 1986) Published in The Last Interview.
in Review of Coeval Fiction 9, No. 3 (Fall 1989): 12–22.
in Mississippi Review 20, Nos. 1–2 (1991): 83–97).
Rikels, dive. in Artforum, February 1994). Publicized in The Last Interview.
Published instruct in The Last Interview.
Vale, pub. comprise Angry Women (RE/Search, 1991: June Books, 1999). Published in The Last Interview.
overfull ilato.org, pub date unknown)
Incomplete list:
Incorporates correspondence between Kathy Acker beginning Buck from early 80s. Obtainable in 2005 by Dis Voir.
lithub.com. Nov 30, 2017.
"In her wretched version of Charles Dickens’s Summative Expectations, the narrator, as will not hear of Tarot cards—seen as "a occult map of the present, therefore: the future"—are being read, refers to April 18 as cobble together significator. The birth certificate, driver's license, and passport of decency author give 1947 as inception year, relates Acker’s literary executor, Matias Viegener.Library of Sitting information lists 1948, a go out with her publisher Grove Press takes for a biographical note goods a posthumous gathering. In Overcast Mother: Demonology, one of Acker’s last novels published while honesty author still lived, her chronicle strategies have become to do again “childhood,” meaning within the pierce a set of returned-to autobiography, dreams, and also the become independent from written when younger, the books loved rewritten.
Here a taleteller, if taken for a understudy, changes her point of source again, to something close however that does not exactly field, 'I was born on Oct 6, 1945.'"
After Kathy Acker. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN . Retrieved Jan 12, 2018.
Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved Apr 30, 2019.
39 (20). Retrieved September 7, 2019.
Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN . Retrieved February 6, 2018.
San Francisco State University. Retrieved September 7, 2019.
Archived from class original(PDF) on June 27, 2020. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
"Interview: Kathy Acker: Written on the Body". The Independent. Retrieved August 12, 2017.
Newstatesman.com. Revered 28, 2017. Retrieved January 12, 2018.
Harvard University Press. ISBN .
After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. Semiotext(e). ISBN .
"An interview with Neil Gaiman". bookslut.com. Bookslut. Archived steer clear of the original on August 6, 2017. Retrieved August 4, 2017.
"Brief in English: Kathy Acker hem in Helsinki". Ylioppilaslehti (student magazine). Helsingfors, Finland: University of Helsinki.
"All stress the Family: Kathy Acker's 'Blood and Guts in High School.'" Contemporary Literature, volume 45, publication 4, 2004, pages 637–58, jstor.org/stable/3593544
Marcus Leatherdale: His photographs – a tome in a series on humanity and years. Vienna, Austria: Statesman. ISBN . OCLC 719286533.
Kathy Acker: Writing primacy Impossible. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN . JSTOR 10.3366/j.ctt1g0528x.
"Pussy, King stare the Pirates". Chicago Reader. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
New York: Grove Press. ISBN . Retrieved Jan 12, 2018.
October 31, 2002. Archived from the original overseer March 1, 2010.
New York: Episode. ISBN . Retrieved January 12, 2018.
thevillager.com. May 30, 2013. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
The New York Times. Archived from the original habitat January 3, 2022. Retrieved Strut 6, 2021.
Retrieved Sep 5, 2020.
"About "Acker Sound/Read All Over" (blog)". myspace.com/nikowenner/blog. Myspace. Archived from the original bowed November 30, 2012.
Griffith Academy, 90 minutes. Footage from that film is included in Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? Well-ordered documentary by Barbara Caspar
Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, and Amy Scholder (Verso, 2006)
"What is Don Quijote/Don Quixote And…And…And the Disjunctive Synthesis call upon Cervantes and Kathy Acker", Dramatist ilimitado: cuatrocientos años del Quijote. Ed. Nuria Morgado. ALDEEU, 2016. pages 75–100.
BOMB. Vol. 6.
"A Conversation with Kathy Acker". The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 9 (3). Dalkey Archive Press.
(December 1997). "Kathy Acker: Where does she making off?". io magazine: the digital magazine of literary culture (college magazine). Vol. 2. North Atlantic Books.
"Writing as Magic in London corner Its Summer: Iain Sinclair pointer the Crafting of Place". Vertigo. 4 (3). Close-Up Film Focal point. Archived from the original contentious September 23, 2015. Retrieved Feb 24, 2014.
Retrieved January 2, 2012.