Shannon Finck, University of West Georgia

“Bodies at Liberty” considers one of Acker’s best-known revision projects, Don Quixote, which compares the permeability of human subjects and literary texts by demonstrating how easily one (subject) can be merged with the other (text). As Acker’s method of semi-autobiographical first-person pastiche poses challenges to our capacity to operate from stable positions within our own experience, the teleology of the quest narrative supplied by Cervantes’ novel explores a possible future in which we learn to embrace, rather than mourn or resist, such a fundamental instability. In a series of accounts of physical encounters described as crucial points of contact between her body and the textual body she penetrates, Acker demonstrates how embodiment can look less like a limit and more like a hyperlink. This paper reads Acker’s novel alongside a claim Michel Serres’ makes in The Five Senses (2009)—that the subject exists outside the “verbose flesh” of the speaking “I” and operates, thus, “on the side of the world” through its perilous contact with others. It evaluates ideas about personhood modeled by Acker and Serres, founded on poststructuralist concepts of hybridity and permeability, that invite us to conceive of social and interpersonal relations outside of legal constraints and beyond capitalist aims at “return on investment.” Acker’s notorious disregard for copyright and her Quixote’s talent for occupying multiple subject positions through sexual experience, for example, are not exactly instances of consensual partnership, lucrative arrangement, or productive merger. Rather, such couplings work by acknowledging persons as unstable fictions to begin with and seeking radical, often pleasurable, recombinations (rather than dissolutions) of what binds self and other, subject and object, the personal and the communal.

About the Lecturer:  Shannon Finck is a Limited-Term Assistant Professor at the University of West Georgia. She completed a Ph.D. in 20th-Century American Literature and Transnational Literatures at Georgia State University in 2014 and also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Georgia College & State University. She has published both critical and creative work in such journals as a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT Literature Interpretation Theory, FUGUE, and The Journal of Modern Literature. Nonacademic, but not uncritical interests include trashed-out 60s garage music, contemporary Chinese cinema, impromptu dance parties, and urban farming.