Politics, Passion, and Abstraction in Kathy Acker’s “Russian Constructivism”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920487 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emilia Borowska (Royal Holloway University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Pages | vpw022-vpw022 |
| Publication date | 2016-09-12 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpw022 |
| OpenAlex | W2519750311 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
This essay offers an in-depth discussion of Kathy Acker’s 1986 collage of texts “Russian Constructivism,” shedding new light on her relationship with the European avant-garde. It argues that Acker’s work has been co-opted by a strain of postmodern criticism, which sees her as hostile to the utopian project of modernism and traditional notions of authorship and originality, overlooking her profound engagement with the ideas of collaboration, community, and transformation. Using Alain Badiou’s notion of the event and the artistic category of abstraction, this essay instead posits that Acker’s aesthetic borrowings from the avant-garde are part of a utopian and progressive use of the past in order to create new social possibilities in the political present
Abstraction · Aesthetics · Art · Constructivism (international relations · Criticism · Epistemology · International relations · Literature · Modernism (music · Order (exchange · Passion · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Historical and Modern Theater Studies · Psychology · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Law · Philosophy · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
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