ABSTRACT
In the present chapter I want to move from the writer of texts to the text itself. Here, we will examine how one postmodern writer, Kathy Acker, attacks traditional narrative construction within two literary genres. The text under analysis is Acker’s The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1975, hereafter referred to as ALTL,), 1 which parodies genres in order to unmask—at levels of form and content—what she feels these constructions attempt to conceal or repress, namely, destructive social relations under patriarchy and capitalism. 2 Both capitalism and patriarchy Acker traces—at least in large part—to what Kaja Silverman calls the Oedipalization of the subject … and the phallocentricity of that symbolic order” (131). 3 For Acker this state of affairs has much to do with reason, notions of static and autonomous subjectivity, as well as reified social relations.
