Scholarship on Acker's works has paid particular attention to literary strategies of appropriation. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986) has been taken up by many critics as paradigmatic of Acker's technique of feminist appropriation. This chapter recognises that such scholarship is valuable to an understanding of Acker's work, yet seeks to move a conception of Acker's writing away from a focus on appropriation as such in order to offer a more complex articulation of the experimental practices at work in the text.

In part, the longstanding critical focus on appropriation in Acker's work has been engendered by Acker's own comments in interviews around the time of the book's publication. In conversation with Ellen G. Friedman Acker explicitly remarked: ‘Don Quixote, more than any of my other books, is about appropriating male texts.’ In the same interview, she elaborated on her compositional process and the question of feminist intent:

Many scholars have highlighted Acker's reference here to a method of appropriation that is comparable to Sherrie Levine's art. Levine began producing appropriative art in the late 1970s. Her work was exhibited at Douglas Crimp's ‘Pictures’ show at Artists Space, New York in 1977, an exhibition which, as David Evans has observed, ‘launched a now pervasive art based on possession – usually unauthorized – of the images and artefacts of others’. Levine photographs the photographs of renowned photographers.