My review of Dennis Cooper's I Wished is now available at Full Stop:
Cooper is no doubt one of the most prominent (or notorious) and influential writers of “transgressive” fiction, fiction that deliberately repudiates decorum and restraint in the treatment of subject in fiction. Much transgressive fiction seems to delight in flaunting good taste (or perceived good taste) in its depictions of extreme sexual situations and incipient or actual violence (frequently brutal). In many cases, the transgressions in this fiction are entirely transgressions of content, challenges to reigning assumptions about the acceptable boundaries of a properly “literary” representation of subject. Cooper is somewhat atypical among the current contingent of transgressive writers (putting aside such figures as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker as precursors rather than certified participants in the genre) in that his defiance of the norms of propriety are often accompanied by deviations from conventional form as well.
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