I Love Dick (Native Agents) - Softcover

Kraus, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570270465 ISBN 13: 9781570270468

Publisher: Semiotext, 1997

Synopsis

Oh Dick, I want to be an intellectual like you.

In I LOVE DICK, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, opened up an entirely new era in the history of writing by boldly tearing away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expressions. No wonder it instantly elicited violent controversies and also a host of passionate admirers.

The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist (a colleague of her husband) refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife begin to write a series of letters to one another instead -- detailing the imaginary fling the wife wishes to have with her husband's colleague. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman not only across the American continent and away from her husband, but also far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. Breaking through into honesty whatever the consequences, Kraus paradoxically becomes a-personal and heroic, almost prophetic in its embrace of the world outside. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for itself and for all the injustice in world. It is the kind of book that you can't put down before you finish reading it all and turns you into another person, just like the writer herself.

Between 9:30 aand 11:30 I tried your number four more times but hung up on your machine. At 1:45 a.m. I tried again, your line was busy. At 2:05 I called again and finally reached you. At first your voice was cold, detached. You said you couldn't really talk, but then you did, you did.

About this title

About the Author

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed.

Review

A clever, finely crafted crossover between life, love and cultural studies.

(The Australian)

But my favorite example of the genre is from nearly 20 years ago, and it's by a woman. Chris Kraus's 'I Love Dick' offers the story of a woman named Chris Kraus―also an experimental filmmaker, just like the author―reckoning with her unrequited love for 'Dick ____,' a cultural critic with whom she becomes obsessed. The narrative is an exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy ('I think desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy―a claustrophobia inside your skin') and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act.

(The New York Times)

The most important book about men and women written in the last century.

(The Guardian)

The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable―especially now, when everything is so confusing, so full of despair. I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too.

(Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers)

A little masterpiece of late twenieth century literature.

(East Hampton Star)

Devastatingly funny and sublime... a new classic.

(The Seattle Stranger)

Ever since I read I Love Dick, I have revered it as one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating, and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page... I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind.

(Post Road)

Tart, brazen and funny... a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behavior, power, control.

(The Nation)

The biggest art revelation of the year.

(The New Zealand Listener)

Unexpectedly riveting.

(Bookforum)

Edition details

• Publisher: Semiotext
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1570270465
• ISBN 13: 9781570270468
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275