Eat your Heart Out

What makes the work of the American experimental writer Kathy Acker so utterly
relevant today, almost thirty years after her passing? The articles collected
in this volume aim to provide answers to this question. Indeed, through
studies of both Acker’s published and unpublished works, analyses of her
writing process, and pieces blurring the boundaries between critical and
creative writing, these articles map the writer’s body of works and weave webs
the way the “Black Tarantula” would. Kathy Acker was part of a tradition of
literary radicals and rebels of the 20th century avant-garde that flourished
in the Counterculture and continued in the punk culture. Through acts of
literary piracy and shock tactics, she unveiled and stood against techniques
of domination and control. Indeed, she appropriated others’ texts, subverted
genres and genders and thus challenged the rigidity of meaning and identity to
allow them to fluctuate and flow. These texts confirm the central roles of
both body and language in Acker’s works as spaces of friction between power
and liberation and position the writer as a radical practitioner, a visionary.