Great Expectations

By Kathy Acker

Book Overview

This book begins when a young boy, Pip, learns he has come into great expectations. What these expectations actually are, or the change from the total disparity between Pip's ideas of 'expectations' and what is real to Pip's learning to feel, is the narrative of this plagiarized Bildungsroman.

Thus Great Expectations is both the story of a young boy's introduction to the world and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Acker's relationship with society is in question, texts given by the society--Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Reage, Victoria Holt, Keats--appear both as they were written and in a new and interrogative light. The whole culture is brought into question.

Out of the agony of the author's total disenchantment, or plagiarism, appears beauty: given text is laid on given text; language is no longer used to control but to be; the reader touches language rather than is controlled by it; meaning changes to tapestry. This book is totally sensuous.

This book is "the most completely unified work of art Acker has yet produced. One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist." - Alain Robbe-Grillet

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940170043
• ISBN13: 9780940170049
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Station Hill Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.

Customer Reviews

the urge to destroy is a creative urge

In 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.

a wonderful but difficult book

kathy acker doesn't cut any corners - ever. great expectations might shock you, might offend you, might even hurt and disturb you. but acker can deconstruct sexuality and eroticism and living like no one else can, and you might learn a lot about yourself and this rough, confusing existence.