SOURCE: "Purloined Letters: The Scarlet Letter in Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 35, No. 3, Spring, 1994, pp. 173-80.

In the following essay, Phillips explores the significance of Acker's allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in Blood and Guts in High School.

In the years since critics first took notice of Kathy Acker, considerable comment has been made on her use of other writers' language and plot lines in her fiction—and rightfully so. Acker has taken literary "borrowing" to its most bizarre extreme. Large portions of her books are undisguised reworkings of earlier writers' fictions; often such passages are used verbatim with no clue as to where the borrowed material ends and Acker's own language begins. Her 1982 work, Great Expectations, has as the title of its first section a single word: "Plagiarism." The novel's first few lines do indeed...