Eros the Bittersweet

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986) is the first book of criticism by the Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and classicist Anne Carson.

Eros the Bittersweet
AuthorAnne Carson
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre
  • Nonfiction
  • criticism
PublisherPrinceton University Press
Publication date
1986
AwardsModern Library: 100 Best Nonfiction Books (Reader's List)
ISBN9780608027401

A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"),[1] Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, […] formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output",[2] and establishing her "style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature".[3]

Summary

The book traces the concept of eros in ancient Greece through its representations in writings of the time. It examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain, as exemplified by a word of Sappho's creation: "glukupikron" (the "bittersweet" of the book's title).[4]

Carson considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists (Longus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Chariton), and Plato (in his Phaedrus).[5][6] Her analysis of Sappho's Fragment 31 sees "eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence – […] eros as lack."[7]

Reception

Acclaim for Eros the Bittersweet grew in the fifteen years after it was published in 1986: in the words of John D'Agata, the book "first stunned the classics community as a work of Greek scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to the lyrically based essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as 'literature' and redesigned for an entirely new audience, it finally stunned the poets."[8]

By the turn of the millennium, Eros the Bittersweet had also entered into the popular consciousness, voted onto the 1999 Modern Library Reader's List for the 100 Best Nonfiction books of the 20th century,[9] and mentioned (along with Autobiography of Red) in a 2004 episode of the television series The L Word.[10]

References
  1. Carson, Anne (1981). Odi et Amo Ergo Sum. Toronto: University of Toronto. [Doctoral thesis; under the name Anne Carson Giacomelli]
  2. Rae, Ian (27 December 2001). "Anne Carson". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
  3. "Anne Carson". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 14 September 2020.
  4. Corless-Smith, Martin (2015). "Living on the Edge: The Bittersweet Place of Poetry". In Wilkinson, Joshua Marie (ed.). Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-05253-0.
  5. Scranton, Roy (Spring 2014). "Estranged Pain: Anne Carson's Red Doc>". Contemporary Literature. University of Wisconsin Press. 55 (1): 202–214. doi:10.1353/cli.2014.0010. Retrieved 18 September 2020.
  6. Rae, Ian (Autumn 2010). "Runaway Classicists: Anne Carson and Alice Munro's 'Juliet' Stories". Journal of the Short Story in English. Presses universities d'Angers (55 – Special Issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro): 6. ISSN 1969-6108. Retrieved 18 September 2020.
  7. Carson, Anne (1998). "Tactics". Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-1-56478-188-8.
  8. D'Agata, John (1 June 2000). "Review: Men in the Off Hours". Boston Review. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
  9. "Modern Library: 100 Best Nonfiction". Modern Library. Archived from the original on 6 March 2012. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
  10. O'Rourke, Meghan (11 February 2004). "Hermetic Hotties: What is Anne Carson doing on The L Word?". Slate. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
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