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I teach from this book also. It's a fantastic read for anyone who enjoys language and thinking about the time when written language first appeared for the Greeks, and they thought it was a dangerous new technology that would destroy intellectual life.
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Do you know how what we call "love," came to be? Anne Carson does. She examines the nuances of love, through the lens of Greek fragments and culture. Her chapter titles: "Ruse," "Tactics," "The Reach," pars out the subtleties of desire with all its paradoxical underpinnings. If you've ever wondered if your lover was playing a "game," read this book to understand the impossibility and awesome responsibility for wanting what you want, denying it so you can eventually enjoy it, and where honesty t
“So I found that hunger was a way of persons outside windows that entering takes away. –Emily Dickinson, I Had Been Hungry
“Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact. The interaction is a fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge. No one took a more clear-eyed view of this matter than Sappho.”What must it be like to have Anne Carson’s mind? What does she think about while eating breakfast or tying her shoelaces? Perhaps eros and every shade of its meaning from Sappho to the presen...
In one of her chapters Anne Carson writes, "Imagine a city where there is no desire. Supposing for the moment that the inhabitants of the city continue to eat, drink and procreate in some mechanical way; still, their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where [ . . . ] A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination." Carson's elucidation of this idea - that desire is what mov...
Anne Carson’s debut book is certainly an impressive piece of scholarship, which, for this particular reader, made this both a pleasure and a burden to trudge through. Summoning her impressive knowledge of Greek drama, prose (both philosophic and fictional) and poetry, Carson conjures a daring argument about the symbiotic and triangular connections between words on a page, their writer and their reader, with the notion of “desire” as the Spanish Fly that keeps all the sweaty limbs and soiled shee...
There are no words for how perfect this book is. A gorgeous exploration of the edges of personhood, letters, desire. Endlessly fascinating and utterly engrossing. I couldn't put it down. I want to fall in love. A sample from a favorite passage:"The English word 'symbol' is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of sym...
"Both the experience of desire and the experience of reading have something to teach us about edges. We have endeavored to see what that is by consulting ancient literature, lyric and romantic, for its exposition of eros. We have watched how archaic poets shape love poems (as triangles) and how ancient novelists construct novels (as a sustained experience of paradox). We caught sight of a similar outline, even in Homer, where the phenomenon of reading and writing resurfaces in Bellerophon's stor...
Carson always perches her work in the most precarious positions. One wonders what exactly they are holding in their hand: is it scholarship? A novel? An art book? A translation? A sequel? A reimagining? Such questions are certainly important, but ultimately feel somewhat beside the point insofar as the response always seems to be a quiet but unapologetic "it is, and—." I found it curious yet unsurprising that Eros, Carson's first published text, is so preoccupied with paradox and "in-between" sp...
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope. Listen. I might not always agree with Dr. Anne Carson, and in fact I often disagree with her, but oh my god she is so smart and so eloquent. One of the most brilliant scholars I've ever read.Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absen
It's all coming back to me now, why I dislike this kind of theoretical, transhistorical argument grounded in a series of close readings. The author appears to believe that she has stumbled upon a deep psychological, even ontological, truth which transcends all context and time, as well as any counter-examples. This is an enormous claim, and it would take something verging on religious faith to countenance it based on what it presented here. My own personal experience is an important counter-exam...
Anne Carson, following Sappho, argues that Eros is a lack, a wound, a gesture toward a wholeness that's only possibility exists in our total self-annihilation. This sort of also describes my relationship to this book. I can only read it as a void, a gaping hole in myself, knowing that I will never make something so perfect.
What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges. The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move. And there is Eros, nervous realist in this sentimental domain, who acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a myster...
