Acker was associated with the New York punk movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The punk aesthetic influenced her literary style.[24] In the 1970s, before the term "postmodernism" was popular, Acker began writing her books. These books contain features that would eventually be considered postmodernist work.[25] Her controversial body of work borrows heavily from the experimental styles of William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras, with critics often comparing her writing to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet. Critics have noticed links to Gertrude Stein and photographers Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography,[16] as well as classic literature.
Acker's novels exhibit a fascination with, and an indebtedness to, tattoos.[26] She dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist.
Acker published her first book, Politics, in 1972. Although the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973, she published her first novel (under the pseudonym Black Tarantula), The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses. The following year, she published her second novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining. Both works are reprinted in Portrait of an Eye.[27]
In 1979, she received popular attention after winning a Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." She did not receive critical attention, however, until publishing Great Expectations in 1982. The opening of Great Expectations is an obvious re-writing of Charles Dickens's work of the same name. It features her usual subject matter, including a semi-autobiographical account of her mother's suicide and the appropriation of several other texts, including Pierre Guyotat's violent and sexually explicit "Eden Eden Eden." That same year, Acker published a chapbook, entitled Hello, I'm Erica Jong.[3] She appropriated from a number of influential writers. These writers include Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, the Brontë sisters, the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Arthur Rimbaud.[28]
Acker wrote the script for the 1983 film Variety.[29] Acker wrote a text on the photographer Marcus Leatherdale that was published in 1983, in an art catalogue for the Molotov Gallery in Vienna.[30]
After a series of failed contracts to publish Blood and Guts in High School, Acker made her British literary debut in 1984 when Picador published the novel, followed by publication in New York by Grove Press.[18] That same year, she was signed by Grove Press, one of the legendary independent publishers committed to controversial and avant-garde writing; she was one of the last writers taken on by Barney Rosset before the end of his tenure there. Most of her work was published by them, including re-issues of important earlier work. She wrote for several magazines and anthologies, including the periodicals RE/Search, Angel Exhaust, monochrom and Rapid Eye. As she neared the end of her life, her work was more well-received by the conventional press; for example, The Guardian published a number of her essays, interviews, and articles, among them was an interview with the Spice Girls.[16] In Memoriam to Identity draws attention to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound and the Fury, constructing or revealing social and literary identity. Although known in the literary world for creating a whole new style of feminist prose and for her transgressive fiction, she was also a punk and feminist icon for her devoted portrayals of subcultures, strong-willed women, and violence.[3]
Notwithstanding the increased recognition she garnered for Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School is often considered Acker's breakthrough work. She first began composing the book in 1973 while living in Solana Beach, writing and drawing fragments in notebooks before compiling the manuscript in 1979.[18] Published in 1984, it is one of her most extreme explorations of sexuality and violence. Borrowing from, among other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex-addicted and pelvic inflammatory disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery. In its original publications by Picador and Grove Press, the final two chapters were accidentally reversed from Acker's intended order; the mistake was corrected in the 2017 re-publication of the novel.[18] Many critics criticized the book for being demeaning toward women, and Germany banned it completely. Acker published the German court judgment against Blood and Guts in High School in Hannibal Lecter, My Father.
Acker published Empire of the Senseless in 1988, and considered it a turning point in her writing. While she still borrows from other texts, including Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the appropriation is less obvious. However, one of Acker's more controversial appropriations is from William Gibson's 1984 text, Neuromancer, in which Acker equates code with the female body and its militaristic implications. In 1988, she published Literal Madness: Three Novels, which included three previously-published works: Florida deconstructs and reduces John Huston's 1948 film noir Key Largo into its base sexual politics, Kathy Goes to Haiti details a young woman's relationship and sexual exploits while on vacation, and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini provides a fictional autobiography of the Italian filmmaker in which he solves his own murder.
Between 1990 and 1993, she published four more books: In Memoriam to Identity (1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991); Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), also composed of already-published works; and My Mother: Demonology (1992). Her collection, Portrait of an Eye, was championed by publisher Fred Jordan, who had discovered her work at Grove Press before moving to Pantheon and sent an early copy of the book to William Burroughs in 1991.[31] Her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, was published in 1996,[32] which she, Rico Bell, and the rest of rock band the Mekons also reworked into an operetta, which they performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1997.[33]
In 2007, Amandla Publishing re-published Acker's articles that she wrote for the New Statesman from 1989 to 1991.[34] Grove Press published two unpublished early novellas in the volume Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America, and a collection of selected work, Essential Acker, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper in 2002.[35][36]
Three volumes of her non-fiction have been published and republished since her death. In 2002, New York University staged Discipline and Anarchy, a retrospective exhibition of her works,[37] while in 2008, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts screened an evening of films influenced by Acker.[38]
