Notes from Source: While much cogent criticism has been devoted to this spiritual dimension of the collection, including to sublime decreation (e.g., Disney; Skibsrud), and in particular to Carson’s engagement with Weil (e.g., Fan; Coles), few scholars have effectively drawn on systematic research into the role of the reader as a text-constructing agent in Carson’s work, with the exceptions of Liedeke Plate’s multimodal approach to Nox (2010), and Solway’s polemical attacks, wherein he argues that Carson is riding the zeitgeist of superficial erudition and that her readers see themselves reflected in her gratuitous showmanship (49-50). Kristeva’s central idea, derived from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (37) has already been discussed at length in a great many other works.3 I build on these studies by incorporating Kristeva’s notion of dialogism into critical discussions of Carson’s work within the context of her disjunctive collection Decreation. [T]he author makes the reader feel this transformation taking place by showing how language draws the reader into a vortex of thought and emotion by establishing systems of association that become part of the speaker’s subconscious response to phenomena. Yet crucially, the collection opens with an unnamed speaker who addresses their mother. Since the mother figure plays a prominent role in many of Carson’s works-from the mother as a modern Demeter in the autobiographically inspired The Beauty of the Husband (2001), to G’s mother’s death in Red Doc> (2013) and Carson’s reflection on her own mother’s death in Men in the Off Hours (2000)-this evocation of the mother-child relationship leads me to argue that Decreation is organized in such a way to make the reader wrongly believe that the speaker is Carson herself, or at least a persona that is close to her.

Further Notes: Place: VANCOUVER BC Publisher: Univ British Columbia