Universitt Hamburg 53-566: The Literary World of Kathy Acker Winter term 13/14 HA Prof. Dr. Florian Zappe

How do Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine

deconstruct the notions of originality and

creativity? A comparative analysis between the artists

Germn de la Cruz Blanca Matrikelnummer: 6425392 Free mover exchange student (bei Alexander Bednasch) Herrengraben 68, 20459 Hamburg Tel.: 01520 308 9797 gdelacruzblanca@gmail.com

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Table of contents:

1. Introduction....2 2. Plagiarism and appropriation strategies: drawing the line between the

original work and its reproduction.....3-5

3. Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine: how do they deconstruct the notions of originality and creativity?.............................................................................6-12

4. Conclusion.12-13 5. Bibliography.....14-15

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1. Introduction:

This essay will be centered on two American artists: Kathy Acker and Sherrie

Levine. Concretely, the topic of the paper will be a comparative analysis of how the two

artists use appropriation strategies to deconstruct the traditional the notions of creativity

and originality. First, the concepts of plagiarism as well as appropriation strategies

related to the postmodernism will be defined. Consequently, the comparative analysis

will take part, having a look at both artists simultaneously. In this section, biographical

data of both artists will be mentioned concurrently so as to see their connection within

the arts. Two interviews with Acker and Levine will also be included as the main

sources due to the fact that they are the relevant material, which help to uncover the

truth about the way these artists create their work, as well as to what extent their works

relate to each other. These interviews are A Conversation with Kathy Acker by Ellen G.

Friedman and After Sherrie Levine by Jeanne Siegel. At last but not least, the

conclusion, with which the paper will try to come with a final point, trying to elucidate

the reasons that led Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine to employ appropriation strategies

and therefore, showing what their works mean to them in terms of originality and

creativity.

Regarding Kathy Ackers works, two of her novels Blood and Guts in High School and

Don Quixote, as well as other novels mentioned in the interview will help to understand

when the aforementioned literary strategies take part, and on behalf of Levine, two of

her most relevant works After Walker Evans and After Courbet will be taken a look at

so as to know her opinion regarding these methods of appropriation or repetition.

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2. Plagiarism and appropriation strategies: drawing the line between the original work and its reproduction.

What is an original and what is a reproduction? According to the oxford dictionary,

originality is the ability to think independently and creatively as well as the quality

of being novel or unusual1 and a reproduction is a copy of a work of art, especially a

print or photograph of a painting.2 Taking this premise as a starting point, numerous

postmodern literacy works have been accused of having lack of originality. Writers and

artists have used techniques such as plagiarism or appropriation, and in order to situate

these strategies, the term postmodernism will be defined, due to the fact that plagiarism

and appropriation strategies have been linked to this literature and art period. The

second aim is to define plagiarism and appropriation strategies from a postmodernist

point of view and see whether they are different or relate to each other.

According to Marilyn Randall, plagiarism has carried away negative connotations

throughout history. Rarely, except in the hands of [] plagiarists, has the practice

been considered in a positive lights. She comes up with the aforementioned period

Postmodernism, eluding that thanks to it, strategies like plagiarism or appropriation

strategies, which have been used by Sherrie Levine or Kathy Acker, are scarcely

distinguishable from real plagiarism and [] have been threatened with copyright

lawsuits. She raises the question of whether there are aesthetics of plagiarism that

are part of the specificity of postmodernism.3 It is necessary to have in mind the

possibility that plagiarism has become a kind of an extended convention within the

postmodern aesthetic. Nevertheless, it is also likely that the definitions of plagiarism,

originality and authenticity of their own creators, are not conventional as they think. As

said by the oxford dictionary, Postmodernism is a late 20th-century style and concept

in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism

and its characteristics are the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a

mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories.4 For

Douglas Crimp, Postmodernism can only be understood as a specific breach with 1 Anon, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/originality, last seen on Monday 31st at 12:35 2 Anon, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/reproduction, last seen on Monday 31st at 12:40 3 Buranen, Lise, and Alice Myers Roy, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p.131 4 Anon, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/postmodernism, last seen on Monday 31st at 16:40

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modernism, with those institutions which are the preconditions for and which shape the

discourse of modernism. These institutions are the museum, art history and

photography.5

The two protagonists of this paper, Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine, have been related

to plagiarism and appropriation in numerous of their works: Blood and Guts in High

School or Don Quixote, or After Walker Evans, respectively. Plagiarism has connections

with the arts and the moral and legal fields. It is often discussed in simplistic terms:

using someone elses words without telling whose they are or where you got them.6 As

for the term of appropriation, the oxford dictionary cites that the term is the deliberate

reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art.7 The context of

the works and their justification are based on the background against the role of the

image. Then, the appropriation appears, not to represent reality through an image, but

by re-contextualizing earlier works. Douglas Crimp is an art critic who wrote an essay

called Pictures (in which he found useful to employ the term postmodernism),

gathered the work of artists, such as Jack Goldstein, Laurie Anderson or Sherrie Levine.

Their images are purloined, confiscated, and appropriated, stolen.8. Appropriation, as

well as plagiarism, questions several points: the genius, authorship, creation, the

sustainability and originality. According to Randall, plagiarism, historically has always

been bad, as well as Laurie Stearns, who claims people commonly think of it as being

against the law. She goes on by saying that plagiarism is not a legal term [] and

therefore it does not necessarily constitute a violation of copyright law. Julie Sanders,

who focused on postmodern borrowings, questions certain academic stance where

Shakespeare allusions to the classical authors (Ovid, Plutarch, etc.) are considered a

legitimate practice while the contemporary creators enter the field of plagiarism.9 Due

to the multifaceted nature of the techniques, there isnt any work or an author that could

be considered canonical and which could serve as a model for these topics. However, 5 Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p. 91. 6. Introduction. Buranen, Lise, and Roy, Alice Myers, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. xv-xvi 7 Anon, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/appropriation, last seen on Monday 31st at 17:41 8 Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p. 91-92. 9 Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. The New Critical Idiom. London; New York: Routledge. p.34

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there is a criterion that relates postmodern plagiarism to appropriation and adaptation

strategies: intertextuality. Asa Berger cites:

We live in a world in which simulation is all important - in which real objects are replaced by their copies and in which culture has to be seen as an assemble of texts, all of which are intertextually related to one another and gain their meaning from the connection to other texts that preceded them.10

Along the same lines Asa Berger interprets that intertextuality aims at weakening the

alleged importance of the so-called originality.11 According to Sanders, she suggests

that originality is not a concept of interest when the current artistic production is based

on the DIY of items and borrowings. Sanders, has thought about the different types of

versions and the differentiation between what it is to appropriate and to plagiarize.

Occasionally, she focuses directly on the postmodern discussion:

On what grounds, after all, could such a judgment be made? Fidelity to the original? [] It is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take place.12

One could say that from a traditional perspective, it seems contradictory to consider the

presence of a relationship between the semantic change and plagiarism. However, it

could occur that plagiarism happens through a partial copy instead of a complete and

literal one, such as the stealing of paragraphs or elements considered substantial, as well

as the suppression of the source, which is vital from the canonical point of view. Thus,

how can one define plagiarism from a postmodernist view? For Stearns, plagiarisms

essence from a modernism perspective is a failure of the creative process through the

authors failure either to transform the original or to identify its source. The author

claims that people usually loathe plagiarism because it is a form of cheating that allows

the plagiarist an unearned benefit. She states that there are two types of these benefits:

tangible and intangible, the first corresponds to the work and becomes moneymaking

and the second takes place when it gives certain personal or professional status to the

10 Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003. The Portable Postmodernist. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. p. ix 11 Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003. The Portable Postmodernist. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. p. viii-x 12 Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. The New Critical Idiom. London; New York: Routledge. p.20

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plagiarist.13

Do Kathy Acker or Sherrie Levine have the same opinion about this topic? How do they

create their works? What is to appropriate for both artists? Or, more importantly, what

is originality or creativity for Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine? The next section will

take a look at their thoughts on the matter.

3. Kathy Acker and Sherrie Levine: how do they deconstruct the notions of originality and creativity?

What is it that these two artists have in common? As mentioned earlier, both Kathy

Acker and Sherrie Levine have been accused of using plagiarism and appropriation to

create their works. For the first, Levine has been an inspiration in her works, as Martina

Sciolino relates on her chapter on Acker, she has spoken of her affinity for Sherry

Levines photography, which decontextualizes and re-represents photography by

men.14 Either one has used appropriation, as well as cut-up or collages strategies in

order to carry out their works. Thus, why have they come with such techniques? What is

the origin of their way of deconstructing art? What is originality or creativity for them?

Kathy Acker is without any doubt a cult figure of the punk movement. She was born in

New York and regarding the date of her birth, there has been some incongruence on

behalf of Edward Robison who claims that Acker was actually born in 194815 and

Suzette Henke talks in her chapter on Kathy Acker that the writer was born in 1947.16

She is considered among the most remarkable protagonists of radical feminism and the

postmodern literary aesthetic. She would call experimentalism her work with

language, but even though she has been catalogued as feminist writer, she has been

damned by feminists when she was thirty.17 Anyhow, she studied poetry in San Diego

and focused on countercultural fiction published with underground presses in the 13 Stearns, Laurie. Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property and the Law. Buranen, Lise, and Roy, Alice Myers, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 7 14 Sciolino, Martina. 1990. Kathy Acker and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism. College English 52 (4): 437. Doi: 10.2307/377661. p. 441

15 Novel Arguments Reading Innovative American Fiction. 2009. Cambridge Univ Pr. Robinson, Edward S. 2011. Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. Postmodern Studies 46. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi. 16 Hawkins, Susan E. 2004. All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School. Contemporary Literature 45 (4): 637. Doi: 10.2307/3593544. p. 91 17 Friedman G. Ellen 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50

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1970s.14 She was influenced by poetry, mainly the Black Mountain School of poetry.

Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg and David Antin were her educators and even though

they were poets, she somehow wanted to make with fiction what those poets made with

their works. The fact that there werent many prose writers who used the ways of

working of poets she was influenced by, encouraged her to following her writing in that

direction.18 It is the time after having lived in London in the 80s, when she acquired

higher level, becoming an important avant-garde writer whose techniques were

primarily intertextuality, pornography satire and plagiarism. 19 But what is it that led

Acker to plagiarism? First of all, one could raise the question of whether Ackers work

can be truly labeled as plagiarism work. Some scholars of postmodern literature like

Victoria de Zwaan do not hesitate to classify part of her work as texts full of that

technique:

[] Acker weave together material from other texts, without always signaling to us what they are, where they come from, or even that they are lifted out of another text. This is precisely what we call plagiarism.20

De Zwaans statement about literary theft is approaching the traditional proposal: a

substantial copy of the original and the concealment of the source. Nevertheless, when

clarifying the processes of the alleged plagiarism of Acker, De Zwaan is closer to

intertextuality than to plagiarism itself:

This is similar to Ackers approach to plagiarism in Blood and Guts in High School and Don Quixote, where narratives are placed into modern settings with ironic, parodic, and diverse effects. They are signaled as other texts.18

The paradox is clear. It not only designates the source of the borrowing, but also the

original text has additionally undergone a change; it has become parodic. In interview,

Kathy Acker herself, referred to the transformation of a text when she refers to her own 18 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/ last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50 19 Hawkins, Susan E. 2004. All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School. Contemporary Literature 45 (4): 637. Doi: 10.2307/3593544. p. 91 20 De Zwaan, Victoria. 2002. Interpreting Radical Metaphor in the Experimental Fictions of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker. Studies in Comparative Literature 43. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. p. 14/131

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creative process: If I had to be totally honest I would say that what I'm doing is a

breach of copyright - it's not, because I change words-but so what?21 In another

interview, A Conversation with Kathy Acker By Ellen G. Friedman, Acker speaks about

her novel Empire of the Senseless (1988) and she finally confirms that she did use a

number of other texts to write it, though the plagiarism is much more covered, hidden.

Almost all the book is taken from other texts.22 Therefore she made clear that

plagiarism was in use. In the same interview, Acker already gives a fairly explanation of

how she encountered plagiarism, thus confirming the use of this technique.

I came to plagiarism [] from exploring schizophrenia and identity, and I wanted to see what pure plagiarism would look like, mainly because I didnt understand my fascination with it.20

In exploring schizophrenia and identity, Acker wrote three novels and they are what she

calls the trilogy: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, I

Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac, and Toulouse Lautrec. In the interview she talks about

schizophrenia and identity:

The thing about schizophrenia: I used a lot of autobiographical material in Black Tarantula. I put autobiographical material next to material that couldnt be autobiographical. The major theme was identity, [] After that, I lost interest in the problem of identity. The problem had for me in a sense been solved by that trilogy. After that I became interested in plagiarism, working with other texts.20

21 Dettmar, Kevin (1999). The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism. Eds. Lise Buranen y Alice Myers Roy. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 106. 22 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/ last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50

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Two of her most well known novels Blood and Guts in High School and specially Don

Quixote are mentioned in the interview and it is through the interview, where Acker

gives way to Sherrie Levine: What I really wanted to do was a Sherrie Levine painting.

Im fascinated by Sherries work.20 Since the

80s, Levine has been known for her work with

appropriation of well-known photographs or

paintings. Her famous work is a series of

photographs named After Walker Evans, in

which she made photographic replicas of

Evanss work. In 1936, Walker Evans

photographed the Burroughs, a family of

sharecroppers in Depression era in Alabama. In 1979, Levine re-photographed Walker

Evans photographs from the exhibition catalog First and Last. She also turned to

pictures by other figures from the history of art, such as Karl Blossfeldt and the

commercial photographic team Gottscho- Schleisner. Regarding her way of thinking

towards the way she photographs, once she said about it:

I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of aloofness. [] It is my aspiration that my photographs, which contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both worlds.23

Already in works of the early 1980s, Levine poses for the first time issues that

modernity had absolutely relegated: copy, plagiarism, parody or quotation but what is

really appalling is her comment on the technique of appropriation itself:

I never aspired to belong to a school of appropriators. That is a label that makes me cringe because its come to signify a polemic; as an artist, I don't like to think of myself as a polemicist.24

On the other hand, for Acker, being accused of plagiarizing does not seem to matter

very much. In the aforementioned interview with Acker, she corroborates what she was

23 Levine, Sherrie, http://photoquotations.com/a/408/Sherrie+Levine, last seen on Monday 31st at 19:20 24 Siegel, Jeanne. 1985. After Sherrie Levine. Interviewed by Jeane Siegel on ARTS Magazine, Available at http://www.artnotart.com/sherrielevine/arts.su.85.html last seen Monday 31st 12:30

Left: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1981; Right: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmers Wife, 1936.

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interested in was what happens when you just copy something, without any reason.25

Noticeably, Acker traces back Levine by putting emphasis on the fact that she doesnt

mean Levines work does not have a justification but it was the simple fact of copying

that fascinated her.23 Acker, while trying to do what Levine did, used the technique of

repetition: a paragraph is repeated five times, and that its just one example of Blood

and Guts in High School.26 Why would she do that? She told G. Friedman about the

way she started using repetition in her novel I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac, as well

as exploring language within a problem.23 On behalf of Levines art, she was interested

in the idea of multiple images and mechanical reproduction and therefore influenced

Acker. Levine said that having done a lot of commercial art has an impact on her work.

She was truly fascinated by the way commercial art dealt with the idea of originality

and claims that if they were keen on an image, they would simply take it. She loved the

fact that there was no sense that images belonged to anybody, [] therefore it was

never an issue of morality; it was always an issue of utility.27

In the aforementioned interview with Kathy Acker, Friedman speaks about Don Quixote

and later on she tells her that in reading it, she is a woman reading Don Quixote,

therefore, whether this is a way of appropriating the language for women. Acker

seems to confirm what has been said earlier: I picked Don Quixote as a subject really

by chance. I think it was a bit incidental, perhaps consciously incidental, that it was a

male text. Afterwards, she insists that she hasnt thought of a statement such as I am a

woman, a feminist, and Im going to appropriate a male text, yet, she maintains the

coincidence of having done it that way.28 What about Sherrie Levine? She claims that

much of her work has been [] realizing the difficulties of situating herself in the

art world as a woman, because the art world is so much an arena for the celebration of

male desire.25 25 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/ last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50 26 Acker, Kathy. 1989. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove Press. p. 22-25 27 Siegel, Jeanne. 1985. After Sherrie Levine. Interviewed by Jeane Siegel on ARTS Magazine, Available at http://www.artnotart.com/sherrielevine/arts.su.85.html last seen Monday 31st 12:30 28 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/ last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50

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But one thing that Acker and Levine have in common is the purpose of their work; they

create pieces of texts or art for themselves and afterwards, they question the meaning of

it. On that matter, Sherrie Levine quoted:

I make the things I want to make. The language and the rhetoric come afterward when I attempt to describe to myself and to other people what I've done, but I'm not making the art to make a point or to illustrate a theory. I'm making the picture I want to look at which is what I think everybody does. The desire comes first.25

Kathy Acker comes with a similar description of what is for her, the creation of a work,

but eventually, she agrees that the more she writes, the more she focuses on the

audience, which would be different in Levines case:

I write for myself and maybe my friends. Although as I give readings more and more, I try and see whether the audience is bored. There has to be that element of entertainment, really, or theres limited accessibility. So I do care about my readers in that way.29

Levine requests that images should be seen in an entirely different context than that in

which they were first made. Her photographs bring to mind questions about gender or

authority. If the photographer has that request, it would be rather complicated to rethink

what is an original or what is a reproduction. These questions of originality and

reproduction are posed in Levines After Courbet (2009), which is composed by

eighteen postcards showing Courbets famous 1866 composition titled LOrigine du

monde. Courbet depicted the torso and genitals of a model; Levine undoes both

operations by presenting the once- taboo work multiple times and in the format of an

easily acquired souvenir. In After Courbet Levine challenges assumptions about the

experience and reception of art.30

29 Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/ last seen on Monday 31st at 17:50 30 Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p.98

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Therefore, what is originality for both artists? Levine emphasizes in the interview with

Jeanne Siegel, the fact that it is more attractive for her to focus on what it is to own an

image rather than originality itself:

Originality was always something I was thinking about, but there's also the idea of ownership and property. The point is that people want to own things, which is more interesting to me.

On the contrary, Acker revealed that, plagiarism became a strategy of originality.

Such statement is rather confusing, but she later on said that plagiarism is both an

attack on the autobiographical I and a strategy of originality: a textualization of it.

4. Conclusion:

The line between plagiarism and appropriation doesnt exist in that they are not

truly gradations of the same aspect, as the question seems to suggest. Even though both

terms might be associated to copying, plagiarism is not the copy; it is the lie of falsely

demanding authorship. Appropriation when used in art is the recycle of material and as

a tactic it needs recognition of the original in the copy. In that sense, it almost has to be

overt. If the copying is hidden (as in plagiarism) then it is not appropriation art by the

most common definition nor is it really even an attempt at appropriation art. Saying that

appropriation is clearly not plagiarism is not necessarily an endorsement of

appropriation art ethically or otherwise. The place where there is any confusion comes

from influence in other than appropriation. How transformative of ones influences does

one have to be before the work is purely derivative? Over the last three decades

Levines work questions the importance of authorship however, she acknowledged that

a cumulative production of photographic images has enabled an effortless exchange of

influence through borrowing and recasting images. Undeniably, at first of her career,

Levines work had resonance with a growing image-culture, forestalling many of the

discussions around todays digital modes of reproduction, distribution, and sampling.

As much as she defeats conventional ideas of art history, she is also part of the centuries

of artists that have drawn upon the work of their predecessors, either by making visual

references to actual works or by reusing specific or historical titles or subject matter as

nods to the past. Levine has continued that tradition, but she has also pushed it to its

logical extreme by producing work that often stands slight visual difference from her

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source material. One could say that Levine examines the matter of authorship

throughout her works and makes art that is visually appealing and stimulating, but for

some, it is justly unemotional. The fact that she brings this work back into the conscious

of the art world, she was proceeding the art form that is photography, by using it to

increase our consciousness of already existing imagery. On a basic level, we tend to

equate originality with aesthetic newness. Nevertheless, Ackers complex nature in

contemporary art creates confusion with the term intertextuality and even with the

notion of copyright. Regarding the tradition and the intellectual work, they conspire

against postmodern stances, following the line of the borrowing without mentioning the

source. Both artists avoid the direct claim of literary theft; they try to get away from

their works the feeling of bad faith. On the contrary, they focus on the problem with

vague concepts that are linked in a new way of producing literature: authenticity,

according to Levine; plagiarism as a strategy to originality, according to Acker.

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Bibliography Buranen, Lise, and Alice Myers Roy, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Douglas, Crimp. 1980. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, October, Vol. 15, p. 91-101.

Dettmar, Kevin (1999). The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism. Eds. Lise Buranen y Alice Myers Roy. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 99-110.

Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. The New Critical Idiom. London; New York: Routledge. Berger, Arthur Asa. 2003. The Portable Postmodernist. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Sciolino, Martina. 1990. Kathy Acker and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism. College English 52 (4): 437. Doi: 10.2307/377661.

Novel Arguments Reading Innovative American Fiction. 2009. Cambridge Univ Pr. Robinson, Edward S. 2011. Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. Postmodern Studies 46. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi.

Stearns, Laurie. Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property and the Law. Buranen, Lise, and Roy, Alice Myers, ed. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 7

De Zwaan, Victoria. 2002. Interpreting Radical Metaphor in the Experimental Fictions of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker. Studies in Comparative Literature 43. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Hawkins, Susan E. 2004. All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School. Contemporary Literature 45 (4): 637. Doi: 10.2307/3593544. Acker, Kathy. 1986. Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream. New York: Grove Press. . 1989. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove Press. Henke, S. 2008. Oedipus Meets Sacher-Masoch: Kathy Ackers Pornographic (Anti) Ethical Aesthetic. Contemporary Womens Writing 2 (2): 91110. Doi: 10.1093/cww/vpn004.

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Internet sources: Friedman G. Ellen. 1989, A conversation with Kathy Acker. Interviewed by Ellen G. Friedman on The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 9.3, Available at http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-kathy-acker-by-ellen-g-friedman/ Siegel, Jeanne. 1985. After Sherrie Levine. Interviewed by Jeane Siegel on ARTS Magazine, Available at http://www.artnotart.com/sherrielevine/arts.su.85.html Anon, Anon,