Notes from Source: From her seminal Eros the Bittersweet (1986) to her experimental Float (2016), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), Anne Carson’s engagement with antiquity has been deeply influential to generations of readers, both inside and outside of academia. One reason for her success is the versatile scope of her classically-oriented oeuvre, which she rethinks across multiple media and categories. Yet an equally significant reason is her profile as a classicist. In this role, Carson unfailingly refuses to conform to the established conventions and situated practices of her discipline, in favour of a mode of reading classical literature that allows for interpretative and creative freedom. From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary perspective, the volume explores the erudite indiscipline of Carson’s classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. It argues that her classicism is irreducible to a single vision, and that it is best approached as integral to the protean character of her artistic thought. Anne Carson/Antiquity collects twenty essays by poets, translators, artists, practitioners and scholars. It offers the first collective study of the author’s classicism, while drawing attention to one of the most avant-garde, multifaceted readings of the classical past.

Further Notes:

1. The Beginning of Now (Anna Jackson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
2. Chimeras: Empty Space and Melting Borders (Phoebe Giannisi, University of Thessaly, Greece)
3. Carson for the non-Classicist (Rebecca Kosick, University of Bristol, UK)
4. Écriture and the Budding Classicist (Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Stanford University, USA)
5. Erring and Whatever (Gillian Sze, Montreal, Canada)
6. The Gift of Residue (Laura Jansen, University of Bristol, UK)
7. Carson Fragment (Sean Gurd, University of Missouri, USA)
8. Shades (Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Toronto, Canada)
9. The Paratextual Cosmos (Paschalis Nikolaou, Ionian University, Greece)
10. An Essay on An Essay on Irony (Yopie Prins, University of Michigan, USA)
11. The Stesichorean Ethos (P. J. Finglass, University of Bristol, UK)
12. Cunning Intelligence (Ian Rae, Western University, Canada)
13. Mythical Immersions (Vanda Zajko, University of Bristol, UK)
14. Deadly Erotic Tangos and Animal Affinity (Hannah Silverblank, Haverford College, USA)
15. Poetry and Profit (Ella Haselswerdt, UCLA, USA & Mathura Umachandran, Cornell University, USA)
16. More Spectres of Dying Empire (Kay Gabriel, Princeton University, USA)
17. Translation, Transcreation, Transgression (Susan Bassnett, Universities of Glasgow and Warwick, UK)
18. Translating the Canon, Filling the Absence (Eugenia Nicolaci, University of Bristol, UK)
19. Translation Catastrophes: Pinplay (Grace Zanotti, University of Michigan, USA)
20. There it Lies Untranslatable (Elena Theodorakopoulos, University of Birmingham, UK)