When reading Kathy Acker’s fiction one is asked to partake in a surreal textual experience which refuses to fulfil the critical desire for coherency, “sense” and meaning. She is a poststructuralist whose works register the overt influence of poststructuralist theories. The integration of fiction and theory is by no means a coherent enterprise, and this accounts for the complexity of her works. She narrativises poststructuralist theory, and so her thematic concerns are decentralisation, the liberatory potential of unrepressed desire, and the relationship between power and sexuality, and language and representation. Her aesthetic concerns are decidedly political: like William Burroughs, whose cut-up method she emulates, her strategies of

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First published 21 October 2005

Citation: Fare, Diane. "Kathy Acker". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 October 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12, accessed 20 November 2009.]