Close Writing

Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

AvAlice Butler

479 kr

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In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared 'beloved’, reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-04-21
Mått152 x 229 x 20 mm
Vikt445 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor304
FörlagDuke University Press
ISBN9781478033240

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Acknowledgments viiPrologue. Beloved, So Bittersweet xiIntroduction. A Writer’s Love 11. The Diary Piece: The Line, The Cut, the Blur of Two Lives, or Kathy Acker’s Bad Sex Blur 412. The Novel-in-Pieces: “Like Little Birds Testing Their Wings,” or Cookie Mueller’s Adolescent Reverie 833. The Letter Piece: Around Valentine’s Day, 1980, or, Lovesick Perversions in Correspondence 139Postscript. Open Envelopes, or, I Am Still Stung 197Notes 205Bibliography 247Index 265

“Close Writing is a book as much about Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller as it is about the process of writing towards them. This allows a self-reflexive, painfully close analysis of what it is to pursue the objects of one’s critical affection, fanaticism, or love. Alice Butler is an excellent, compelling, and challenging writer. There’s magic here, in the precision and clarity, and in the imaginative entrance into her subjects’ writings and lives.”—Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, Queen Mary University of London“Close Writing is a unique feminist experiment in critical and creative art writing. Combining theoretical insights, deep archival research, and close visual as well as textual analysis, Butler enacts the intimate, performative practice of ‘close writing’ through the traces Acker and Mueller left behind—texts, garments, photographs. This book reimagines reading and writing as acts of affection, resistance, love and proximity across time, loss, love, and feminist desire.”—Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London