Great Expectations (Reissue)
By Kathy Acker
3/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker’s protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother’s suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death.
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (Nueva York, 1947-Tijuana, 1997), novelista, ensayista y dramaturga, construyó una obra personalísima y renovadora a base de sintetizar influencias tan diversas como las de la narrativa de William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras o Gertrude Stein, el nouveau roman, la French Theory, el feminismo, la filosofía, el misticismo y la pornografía. Licenciada en Escritura Creativa por la Universidad de San Diego y con estudios de griego y literatura clásica, vivió entre Estados Unidos e Inglaterra y trabajó como administrativa, secretaria, stripper, performer porno y profe-sora de universidad. Entre sus títulos destacan Great Expectations (1982), relectura libérrima y subversiva del clásico de Dickens, la consagratoria Aborto en la escuela (1984), Don Quijote, que fue un sueño (1986) o El imperio de los sinsentidos (1988). Fotografía: © Corbis Premium Historical - Getty Images.
Read more from Kathy Acker
Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Trouble on Triton Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Literal Madness: 3 Novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Florida Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great Expectations: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Empire of the Senseless: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPussy, King of the Pirates Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bomb: The Author Interviews Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related to Great Expectations (Reissue)
Related ebooks
The Beautiful: Collected Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sub Rosa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Wave Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pussy, King of the Pirates Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We Had No Rules Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After Delores Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spring and Autumn Annals: A Celebration of the Seasons for Freddie Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWeekend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sketchtasy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Girls in 3-B Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Well of Loneliness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Valerie: or, The Faculty of Dreams: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heroine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Adventures of Isabel: An Epitome Apartments Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bite Hard Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Skye Papers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inferno: A Poet's Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Zipper Mouth: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sphinx Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tiny Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLolito Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sodom Road Exit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5O Fallen Angel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Baby Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Mere Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStyles of Radical Will Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Literary Fiction For You
The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If We Were Villains: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Who Have Never Known Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden (Original Classic Edition) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lagos Wife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How It Always Is: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Great Expectations (Reissue)
52 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.
This is Jon typing. Jon has been reading. All day. Mortality has reaped recklessly as of late. Right now two people Jon loves are ill in a real bad way. Jon muses and frets. He reads. Jon loved this book despite it being Wrong. He'd love to quote and paste and rant-and-riff about LIFE. But he won't. Jon listens to Marcin Wasilewski and Morrissey. Jon can't turn off his brain. Jon wallows and wonders. He'd love to read more Acker, but not just yet. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"A narrative is an emotional moving ..." says Acker in Great Expectations, and that seems a fitting hypothesis for the work. It is a river of pathos, and all else is an uncontainable storm. Narrative voices shift frequently and characters are uprooted from time and place, transformed in name and gender. Acker is a skilled plagiarist in the most complimentary sense of the word, and this time uses Dickens' work, Melville's Moby Dick, and Reáge's Story of O as schema for her characters to live in. They argue, they whine, they fuck, they philosophize; stuck in a post-structural narrative, they announce repeatedly that they have no idea what any of it means. A central point Acker makes here is that language is indomitable. Another, that the artist isolates themselves and chases away love. The stereotype becomes the rule. That which is said becomes which is, because that is what we perceive. Maybe. And lots of cunts, always lots of cunts. Acker embraced this same narrative techniques many times over, and her work in the nineteen eighties employs them to excellent effect. This one hell of a book, and it gets even better from here.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Made me think!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this novel Acker aims her critique at the gnarly intersection of capitalism, violence, sexual dysfunction, and male dominance. In order to live out this critique, Acker jettisons most of the (male-dominated) traditions of narrative as she writes, systematically disrupting the stability of characters and setting, and rejecting the claim to authorial originality (as you might guess from the title). Some might say that this rejection is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm more inclined to say it's form following function. Exemplary.