Tactical readings
Subtitle: feminist postmodernism in the novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter
By: Nicola Pitchford.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Lewisburg, [Pa.]; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
Subjects: Acker, Kathy, 1948- -- Criticism and interpretation; Carter, Angela, 1940- -- Criticism and interpretation; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 20th century; Feminist fiction, American -- History and criticism; Feminist fiction, English -- History and criticism; Postmodernism (Literature) -- English-speaking countries; Feminism and literature -- English-speaking countries
Description: "This book argues for putting practices of reading at the center of a revitalized concept of post-modernism. Proposing that reading existing texts and recombining available images are the paradigmatic activities of contemporary cultural and political life, it analyzes the work of feminist novelists Kathy Acker and Angela Carter.

Both writers' novels borrow heavily from other authors, and in doing so they offer strategies for a politically committed rereading of literary history and its interaction with the popular imagination.".

"This study situates Carter's works from the 1970s and Acker's from the 1980s in relation to the political, economic, and cultural discourses commonly circulating during their day. In Carter's case, the immediate context is the recession-aggravated crisis of the British welfare state and of postimperial national identity; and in Acker's, the swallowing-up of oppositional identities and rhetoric by American capitalism during the heyday of "revolutionary" neoconservatism.

Such a historicized approach allows a sense of how small-scale, context-specific tactics of reinterpretation and re-use of language - of the sort theorized by Michel de Certeau - survive and indeed thrive within what has often previously been viewed as the politically indifferent sphere of postmodern culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-217) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction; title: I. A Politicized Postmodernism: Feminist Reading Tactics; title: 2. Kathy Acker's Unreasonable Texts; title: :. Angela Carter's War of Real Dreams; title: 4. Reading Feminism's Pornography Conflict; title: Epilogue: Readers, Disciplinarity, and Social Practices; title: Notes; title: Works Cited; title: Index.