Academic literature on the topic 'Carson, Anne, 1950- – Autobiography of red'

Anne Carson é poeta, ensaísta, tradutora e professora de letras clássicas. Uma das forças reconhecidas de sua obra publicada é o transbordamento singular que promove entre atos de escrita que costumam se distribuir por esses diferentes ofícios. Com uma liberdade e uma exatidão improváveis, misturam-se ali poesia, tradução, ensaio, escólio, crítica literária, conferência, libreto, entrevista e assim por diante. É de fato uma obra que corporifica de maneira admirável a tão falada reciprocidade que une o escrever, o ler e o traduzir. Proponho aqui uma reflexão pontual sobre os modos como esse enlace se dá em Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. Exploro a hipótese de que uma forma quase paradoxal de atenção aos fatos preside os gestos de leitura, tradução e escrita poética que Carson encena e imbrica nesse seu inclassificável livro. Dou ênfase especial ao estatuto do poema de Emily Dickinson que a autora traz ali como epígrafe. É com uma tradução desse poema que abro a minha reflexão aqui.

Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word “prefer” upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?—Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (22-23)His brain was jerking forward likea bad slide projector. Hesaw the doorwaythe house the night the world andon the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking gettinginto a car and Geryon'swhole body formed one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom, the human customof wrong love.—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (75)Like eyes that looked on Wastes—Incredulous of OughtBut Blank—and steady Wilderness—Diversified by Night—Just Infinites of Nought—As far as it could see—So looked the face I looked upon—So looked itself—on Me—I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine—The Misery a CompactAs hopeless—as divine—Neither—would be absolved—Neither would be a QueenWithout the Other—Therefore—We perish—tho' We reign——Emily Dickinson, poem 693Herman Melville, Anne Carson, and Emily Dickinson. These authors' bits of language just claimed me as I stared at some books on my office shelf, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of these passages except that I like them. So I'm listing them for you. You might also like them. I like many things, and in no particular order. For instance, here's what I “liked” one day, not long ago, on Facebook: a picture of the word Puppies! scrawled on a sidewalk; a New York Times story about the disorganization of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 (that war has a huge, nearly comical significance in my adopted country of Canada—did you know that Canadians burned down the White House?); an audio clip of Justin Bieber, featuring Busta Rhymes, singing “Little Drummer Boy”; my friend and colleague Jordan Stein's “vegan homo Thanksgiving” photo album; a posting by my “friend” “Emily Dickinson”; numerous updates about and images of the November 2011 pepper spraying of protesting students on the University of California, Davis, campus. I could go on and on, which is probably one of the reasons I, and millions of others, go on and on Facebook. Disorderly is the right word, but the likes are not quite random. People have generated these items, these virtual objects of interest, for rapid public consumption and, with the ubiquity of the “Like” button, for rapid public response. They (we) put stuff out there in part because we're showing off our preferences, or if not our preferences (even though they will be acknowledged with our liking) then at least things that interest us and (we hope) others. It's hard to know exactly what liking something on Facebook means because a like is nearly the same thing as an acknowledgment, something that says, “Yes, I clicked on this item, and it did not displease me.” And often people complain in comments that they wish there were variations on the “Like” button (“I want to express my anger with this piece of information—I wish there were a ‘Hate’ button”). Whatever our motivations or the nature of our interest in what we curate for the world on Facebook, these objects for consumption often go under the heading of like; so, like it or not, we're reading for like—we're doing a little like reading.

Avec Autobiography of Red, son roman expérimental en vers, Anne Carson formalise ce qui sous-tendait déjà ses travaux antérieurs : le pouvoir ambivalent et créatif du manque, un gouffre dont les déclinaisons hantent son œuvre et son processus d’écriture. Dans la recherche du décentrement, dans la déviance textuelle, dans l’amalgame des voix auctoriales, Carson fait pression sur les limites génériques et linguistiques. À travers l’analyse herméneutique d’Autobiography of Red et en prenant également appui sur le corpus de ses œuvres, cet article s’attache à examiner les marques du manque dans le style carsonien, et étudie la tentative vaine (mais fertile) de le dépasser avec l’acte d’écriture.

This paper offers a discursive reading of the Autobiography of Red (1998) written by Anne Carson, a novel loosely based on the myth of Geryon and the Tenth Labor of Herakles. Carson’s Geryon is a fragmented modern subject who is molested as a child and betrayed in a love affair as an adult. At one of its thematic levels the work examines the efforts of an outcast who attempts to reclaim a meaningful subjectivity in a modern world characterized by fragmentation grounded in anxieties, frenetic confusion, and cultural pressures.The term “fragmentation” has a multiplicity of meanings and changes its signi - cance depending on the individual/subjective sociocultural context. The study of the formation of a fragmented self must take into account the variety of factors, including class, gender and cultural frameworks. This paper interrogates such symbiotic relationships between the processes of subject fragmentation within a social realm and the principles and values introduced by the power structures apparent within society. Referring to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where discipline “makes” individuals in the society and is the technique used by the dominant power to control its subjects as instruments, this paper examines the connection between Carson’s novel and the notion of agency within fragmentation. By portraying a sexually disoriented subject, Carson shows how power structures are formed and manipulated through its agents (Geryon’s mother, brother and Herakles), and offers an illustration of the alternatives available to those who resist being framed. I examine the portrayals of such subjects’ striving for liberation from the hierarchies of power through the intertextual embodiment of the image of an eruptive volcano and its generative power of wrath which resists to be categorized or tamed by “Mother Nature.” This paper evaluates the essential features and outcomes of the myth of Geryon as a study of a fragmented subject struggling to bring the fissuring dimensions of his personality and sexuality together to form an autonomous subjectivity.KEYWORDS: Subjectivity, Fragmentation, Power Principle, Body, Individuality Norms

This thesis establishes a phenomenology of desire in Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red. It examines how desire constructs the self in the text and how it positions it in relation to its surrounding world. The self’s status in the text is read through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s understanding of desire and their concepts becoming and deterritorialisation as explicated in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These concepts are used to map the transformative power of desire in Autobiography of Red and provide an approach through which to understand the tenuous nature of self in the text. It reveals desire not as located solely in the relation between the text’s protagonist Geryon and Herakles, but as a movement that animates and constructs the text. It reads the “red” of the title, the presence of the volcano, of lava, as essential to the text, mapping how the force of desire positions the self and undoes the notion of a phenomenal “background”. Deleuzian desire has linguistic implications and the thesis further extends the use of becoming and deterritorialisation to understand Carson’s poetics and the text as the site that gives rise to a phenomenology of desire. The text is deterritorialised and Carson articulates a way of relaying experience beyond the representative mode. The thesis offers a reading of Autobiography of Red with a Deleuzian theory of desire, which is a new approach in Carson scholarship. As such it hopes to open up both the poetic text and theoretic text to new understandings and create points of departure for further research.