This essay traces the anti-Bildungsroman tradition under the influence of surrealism, in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982). While Acker inherits Bataille’s fascination with violence and transgression, these themes are formally developed through the prism of punk and feminist conceptual art and performance. The recent resurgence of critical interest in Acker’s work prompts us to further consider her relationship to surrealism and the modernist avant-garde. While Acker’s homage to Bataille in the early novels signals a brazen ’theft’ of the male avant-garde tradition for feminist subversive ends, Great Expectations experiments with form and language in order to evacuate the Bildungsroman of its bourgeois (gendered) claims to moral authority and insight. While extreme experience in Bataille’s literary work holds out the promise of an affirmation of sorts, the excoriating emotional masochism of Acker’s characters tilts towards nihilism. And yet both Bataille and Acker draw on the Bildungsroman even as they decondition the humanist subject that lies at its very core, straining at the limits of language to represent the vertiginous intensity of affective life and the dissolution of desire into abjection.

Long-associated with “insurgent” or alt.country and what is now “Americana,” Chicago’s Bloodshot Records’ first release (For a Life of Sin: A Compilation of Insurgent Chicago Country, 1994) was a compilation album featuring local punk and indie bands performing various styles of country music. The label’s ongoing use of compilation and tribute albums was not only commercial but also strategic in maintaining a connection to the label’s roots in the Chicago punk and underground rock scene, reinforcing its adherence to a DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic and highlighting small-scale production and consumption practices. This chapter argues that Bloodshot’s tribute albums are significant for the layers of meaning they contributed to a label’s branding and identity by historicizing and legitimating the record label’s early country offerings while offering an argument for the importance of the independent record label and non-mainstream musical practices in the twenty-first century.

One of the most ambitious ruptures inaugurated by punk was the break with previous historical continuities: ‘No Future’ urged youths to reimagine current and potential opportunities, but it also declared the past invalid for contemporary developments. Yet, despite such rhetoric, punk in West Germany looked back to Krautrock for inspiration and influence. From bands as diverse as S.Y.P.H., der Plan, D.A.F., die Krupps, and others, German punks turned to Can, Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk – and the engineering talents of Conny Plank – to help them develop ‘new’ sounds, rhythms, and lyrics. Krautrock is often dismissed as irrelevant to German musical developments, drawing more interest abroad than back home in Germany. Except, as the case of punk indicates, both musically and practically, Krautrock deeply influenced punk efforts at pioneering new German popular musical advances. By examining the continuities and ruptures between Krautrock and German punk, this chapter shows how the former was a critical influence on later German musical developments, and how punk drew on past musical antecedents as they revolutionised German popular music and sought to emancipate German society.