Awards

• Winner of Winner, Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

Overview

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 poem-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.

Full Product Details

9780197680919

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Reviews

By close reading Carson as she so exactingly reads her own temperaments, Coles models with striking delicacy the very entwinement of analytical attention and compositional grace that recurs throughout this book's archive. This is a celebration of the essay's potential as a limber performance of thought, demonstrating what we might continue to learn about unlocking scholarly forms from the range and rebelliousness of Carson's critical itineraries. * David James, author of Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation * Illuminating and original, The Glass Essayist takes the full measure of Anne Carson's achievement to date, from early commentaries on Greek poetry, through poems, translations, essays, lectures, and multi-media collaborations. Via dazzling close readings, Coles makes a bold, compelling argument about Carson's notorious reflexivity, anachronism, and parody in responding to classical and modern writers: these modes reveal 'the unsanctioned emotional life of scholarship,' exposing what is at stake in reading itself. With implications for debates about lyric, translation, performativity, and criticism after critique, this is a work of profound critical sympathy and insight. * Reena Sastri, author of James Merrill: Knowing Innocence *

"By close reading Carson as she so exactingly reads her own temperaments, Coles models with striking delicacy the very entwinement of analytical attention and compositional grace that recurs throughout this book's archive. This is a celebration of the essay's potential as a limber performance of thought, demonstrating what we might continue to learn about unlocking scholarly forms from the range and rebelliousness of Carson's critical itineraries. * David James, author of Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation * Illuminating and original, The Glass Essayist takes the full measure of Anne Carson's achievement to date, from early commentaries on Greek poetry, through poems, translations, essays, lectures, and multi-media collaborations. Via dazzling close readings, Coles makes a bold, compelling argument about Carson's notorious reflexivity, anachronism, and parody in responding to classical and modern writers: these modes reveal 'the unsanctioned emotional life of scholarship,' exposing what is at stake in reading itself. With implications for debates about lyric, translation, performativity, and criticism after critique, this is a work of profound critical sympathy and insight. * Reena Sastri, author of James Merrill: Knowing Innocence * Elizabeth Sarah Coles does a thorough and intelligent job of discussing Carson's career. The monograph covers everything from Eros the Bittersweet to H of H Playbook (2021), a facsimile collage ""playbook"" - a term that suggests both a collection of strategies for a team playing a game and a playbook in the early modern theatrical sense - about Euripides' Herakles. It is serious and erudite in its scholarship and includes, satisfyingly, hefty footnotes, a bibliography and an index. * A.E. Stallings, Times Literary Supplement *"

Author Information

Elizabeth Sarah Coles is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. She studied at the University of Cambridge, winning the Wood-Whistler Medal and Scholarship, and at Queen Mary, University of London. She is co-editor of Wild Analysis (2022).

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