Anne Carson

The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. The first monographic study of her work to date, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while slipping their constraints of form and emotion. Carson's attention to sources -- ancient and modern, textual or visual -- is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style. The book follows Carson's readings through variations in form -- from early academic prose and poems, essays to creative adaptations, and works for performance -- to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson's transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, process, and intent. Carson's portraits of working perform to readers even where she fantasizes her own erasure; where chance, poetic economy, impersonation, and imitation ride the line of anonymity. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and post-critical form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now.

Elizabeth Sarah Coles is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge. She is director of Performing the Lecture, a program of experimental lectures hosted by the CCCB, Barcelona, and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she held a fellowship from 2021 to 2024. Coles is co-editor of Wild Analysis, which won a Gradiva Award in 2022. Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist is her first book.

A Note on the Text Introduction I. VARIATIONS IN CRITICISM 1. The Eros Variations 2. Criticism and the Gift (Carson with Celan) II. GLASS ESSAYS 3. On Not Being Emily Brontë 4. Lyric Transparency and the 'Fictional Essay' III. SPECULATIVE FORM 5. Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 6. Fake Women IV. OPEN TRANSLATION 7. Grief Lessons (Two Stories of Translation) 8. Sappho in the Open Postscript: Short-Talking Acknowledgements Bibliography Notes Index