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
Kathy Acker (nee Karen Alexander) (18 April 1947 - 30 November 1997) was an American experimental novelist, prose stylist, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. One of the leading experimental writers of her generation, she was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, and pornography.Born and raised in New York City, Acker came to be closely associated with the punk movement of the 1970s and '80s that affected much of the culture in and around Manhattan. As an adult, however, she moved around quite a bit. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1968; there she worked with David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg. Acker published her first book, Politics, in 1972. Although the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973 she published her first novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses under the pseudonym Black Tarantula. In 1974 she published her second novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining.In 1979 Acker finally received popular attention when she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." She did not receive critical attention, however, until she published Great Expectations in 1982.
