Thursday, May 14, 2020

The Definitive Critical Work on Kathy Acker by Spencer Dew | A San Diego State University Press Classic


originally posted 7.28.18 | updated 5.14.2020

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Hyperbole Books, a San Diego State University Press imprint, heralds the release of a dynamic title focused on the work of a 20th Century American original: Kathy Acker. Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker by Spencer Dew.


The critics have spoken!

"An indispensable entry into the annals of Ackerania, Spencer Dew's "Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker" provides a poetic, personal, political, and, above all, pedagogical take on a critical figure whose contributions to finding and teaching imaginative ways of engaging with reality cannot be overstated. A deeply humane and insightful book, this should be on the shelf of anyone interested in "the ability of artistic work to affect change in the world" and who also seeks to find the blood and guts of what it means to interact morally and ethically with other human beings."

Kathleen Rooney, author of Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

"So often, academics (myself included) have approached Acker as a punk/plagiarist revolutionary without satisfactorily asking why ultimately is she doing this? Alternatively, Spencer Dew's Learning for Revolution applies the secular concept of the Talmudic (Blanchot) to Acker's work, to propose a compelling answer to that question: Acker's writing aspires to the pedagogical, the instructional... I am not declaring this the end of Acker criticism, but Dew certainly has created an argument that will reverberate throughout Acker scholarship."

Michael Hardin, rogue scholar & author of
Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker

"Progress is possible; plagiarism implies it. Spencer Dew offers an excellent guide to Kathy Acker as a progressive writer, at odds with exploitation and oppression in all forms. He is a patient reader of Acker as reader, of Blanchot and others, for whom friendship is the key to practicing another kind of life. Not the easiest person to befriend in life, Dew shows Acker on the page to be a writer whose generosity borders the infinite."

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto

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