Literal Madness: Three Novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (Acker, Kathy) (Paperback)

by Kathy Acker (Author) "KATHY is a middle-class, though she has no money, American white girl, twenty-nine years of age, no lovers and no prospects of money, who doesn't..." (more)
Key Phrases: murmur murder mirth, rum tanks, scape escape romance, New York, Cap Haitian, Jesus Christ (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini imagines the Italian filmmaker and writer returning to the Roman homosexual hustlers he knew, in a “scathing commentary on false values in art” (The Hartford Courant).

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 13, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802131565
• ISBN-13: 978-0802131560
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #953,034 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #13 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( A ) > Acker, Kathy

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Early Feminist Hyperreal Novels: Best of a New Genre in Fict, July 10, 1997

By A Customer

Kathy Acker has become known as the queen of punk feminist fiction. With Literal Madness she solidified that position. Three short texts unrelated to each other but connected by the quest metaphor. Of the three, Kath Goes to Haiti -- a pseudo-biographical piece -- calls for the most sustained interest. It is ostensibly a travel book adventure in the third world, but ultimately its quest is the undermining of linear narrative. Acker is a storyteller of the postmodern, disjuctive type. She short-circuits the narrative line in order to call the reader's attention to the discontinuous nature of our lives in/as fiction. She creates a hyperreality in Haiti, transforms place into text, and thereby questions the so-called reality principle. When her alter-ego "Kathy" discovers that Haiti is more a state of mind than a Caribbean island, the disjuncture in the text becomes sensible and senseless at the same time. The effect is surreal; but hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard's term) and surreality have in common elments of discontinuity and therfore serve to disorient the reader. Anyone looking for a 'good, old-fashion story' will have to look elsewhere because Acker's book satisfies none of the traditional reader's desires for linear regularity and certain expectability as to what stories do. Labeled pseudo-pornography, Kathy Goes to Haiti and other texts by Acker certainly do contain pornographic elements. But it soon becomes clear to the careful reader that what is at work in her fiction is the question of what pornography "means," especially for women. Can it be a tool to deconstruct itself? Can women themselves use it -- as Acker does -- to undermine its negative effects for women? Literal Madness is a great introduction to these questions for those willing to suspend their need for normal narrative development and to follow Acker through an acrobatics of word and scene, an at times insane juxtaposition of seemingly disparate materials that echo the disparity of our everyday lives and of our dreams. R. L. Mazzola, [e-mail]

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kathy goes to Haiti., April 27, 2000

By	roymeo (san francisco) - See all my reviews

Kathy goes to Haiti. Every man wants her to be his wife. A man takes her home. She is his wife. She cries. Little kids laugh at her. She goes somewhere else. Different men want Kathy as their wife. She doesn't let the first one take her home. Kathy is learning.