A01=Georgina Colby
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Georgina Colby
automatic-update
avant-garde writing
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=D
Category=DS
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSF11
Category=JFFK
Category=JFSJ1
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Pre-order
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
impossibility
Kathy Acker
Language_English
PA=Temporarily unavailable
philosophy of language
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
subjectivity
Product details
- ISBN 9780748683505
- Weight: 600g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Sep 2016
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
An in-depth analysis of the work of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative writers
Kathy Acker’s body of work is one of the most significant collections of experimental writing in English. In Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible, Georgina Colby explores Acker’s compositional processes and intricate experimental practices, from early poetic exercises written in the 1970s to her final writings in 1997. Through original archival research, Colby traces the stages in Acker’s writing and draws on her knowledge of unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, essays, illustrations, and correspondence to produce new ways of reading Acker’s works. Rather than treating Acker as a postmodern writer this book argues that Acker continued a radical modernist engagement with the crisis of language, and carried out a series of experiments in composition and writing that are comparable in scope and rigor to her modernist predecessors Stein and Joyce. Each chapter focuses on a particular compositional method and insists on the importance of avant-garde experiment to the process of making new non-conventional modes of meaning. Combining close attention to the form of Acker’s experimental writings with a consideration of the literary cultures from which she emerged, Colby positions Acker as a key figure in the American avant-garde, and a pioneer of contemporary experimental women’s writing.
Key Features
Examines unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, lecture notes, letters and manuscripts from the Kathy Acker PapersFeatures eleven previously unpublished images of original manuscripts, correspondence, and colour illustrations from the Kathy Acker PapersUtilises major archival study of Acker’s experimental compositional practicesSituates Acker as a late modernist writer and a key figure in the American Avant-Garde
Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.
