Un-Reason and the Ex-Centric Text: Methods of Madness in Kathy Acker's Great Expectations

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Madness is perpetually bound up with contemporary works of art. Michel Foucault, toward the end of Madness and Civilization, describes contemporary texts as frequently “explod[ing] out of madness” (286), creating a dialectic in which madness and art continually, radically oppose one another. The relationship between unreason and art becomes one of competition, “a game of life and death” (287). An insurmountable gulf exists between the two because “madness is the absolute break with the work of art” (287), which tries to make sense of the world.