SOURCE: "Kathy Acker and the Plagiarized Self," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 50-5.

In the following essay, Jacobs examines Acker's postmodern experimentation with authorial identity and literary history.

Postmodernist fiction differs from its modernist precedents less in specific narrative techniques (such as the "nodality" and "paratactics" which David Hayman identifies in writers from Joyce to Sollers) than in the theoretical perspectives from which it employs such techniques. With varying degrees of rigor, American postmodernists have drawn upon post-structuralist theories of language and identity both as the basis for technical experiments and as a frequent topic in their works. If all perception, all knowledge, all emotion and experience is mediated and distorted by arbitrary linguistic structures, the artist's desideratum is to convey a radically unmediated, unstructured, and decentered fictional experience that will abolish "all distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between the conscious and...