Pretty excited to be taking this course in the spring

"W/riting Through Taboo: Language, Power and Politics in Kathy Acker's Automythography."

Literary terrorist Kathy Acker projected numerous personae in her writing and performances, so that even though her written texts can arguably be traced through four increasingly sophisticated phases (autobiography, deconstruction, nihilism and myth), she is best understood if all of her works are read as one and if her public “selves” and her physical body as text are included in her oeuvre. In this course, we will use the four phases as a useful framework for exploring (1)
her use of the taboo as a revelatory alternative to other feminist attempts to dismantle or transcend language, (2) her ritualistic “mythologizing” of her biography and “biographizing” of her personal mythology, and (3) her fugue-like textual performance—a labyrinthine automythography that transcends time and space.