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820 voters
Eros the Bittersweet
by
Anne Carson
A book about love as seen by the ancients, Eros is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the const...more
Paperback, 189 pages
Published
March 1st 1998
by Dalkey Archive Press
(first published 1986)
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Aug 21, 2007
Luisa
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Poets, Helenistic Studies
Shelves:
helenisticstudies
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...more
"Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general..
If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love...more
If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love...more
I began reading this book on a rickety-rackety bus, hemmed in on either side by burly American football players chowing on stinky meatball subs, with our bus driver blaring tinny Bruce Springsteen from a boombox, and methodically working my way through a bag of sour Skittles. An inauspicious start, but even now when I see the title of the book my memory sends a squirt of saliva into my mouth and I can taste those sweets.
My interest in the book survived that beginning, thankfully, and truth be t...more
My interest in the book survived that beginning, thankfully, and truth be t...more
Ruth read this earlier and I decided to give it a go. And Ruth is right—it's a great book. I would add that if anyone is actually going to write about Heraclitus, as I would like to have happen, Anne Carson is the person to do it. For one thing, she spells the greek names with "k's" instead of "c's." This might seem pedantic, but when I thought about it, it made sense for two reasons. First, the ancient Greeks didn't have the letter "c." And second, Anne Carson devotes a great deal of thought to...more
What can we learn about romantic love by looking at ancient greek poetry? I would have said I don't particularly care but Anne Carson's writing, ever poetic in itself even when it's in the form of essays, drew me in. And there's actually a lot to connect to- like, when I go to the movies, why is it that the best moments in an eros-related story are the ones before they hook up, from the moment you realize it's a possibility until when it actually happens (or doesn't happen- it almost doesn't mat...more
There is something intoxicating about reading a scholar who brings erudition and poetic vision to a creative analysis of desire. This book, via a discussion of Sappho and other figures, proves a stunning, trans-textual analysis of variations on the constructions of amorous triangulation, whether that which is seen between three people entangled, viewers and lovers, or those triangulations created by either physical distance or prose via correspondence. It is an essay/adventure, which is deliriou...more
Oct 02, 2007
Jessica
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
lovers
Shelves:
favorites,
love-and-other-indoor-sports
If something terrible happens to me one day, and all that's left is my body, and if, around the same time, something terrible should happen to Anne Carson and all that's left is her brain, I would hope that somehow medical science and luck would combine, and allow these terrible accidents to be resolved through a relatively happy solution, by which one of us (not Ms. Carson) would be greatly improved.
Relatively recently, I realized I didn't have a working definition for eros anymore - that it had expired. Of course that meant it was time to review my Anne Carson: I haven't read this book in almost a decade. Surprisingly, I didn't find myself connecting with this one as much as I used to. She's so elegant in her respect for scholarship and original, lyric travel - and I so enjoy being at her intellectual command - but on this reading I really saw how much of her definition of eros is about th...more
From Semper Augustus
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and a professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. While reading Eros the Bittersweet, her background in classical literature and ancient philosophy was clear and heavy: most of her argument centers on ancient writers. And, indeed, it is her goal to make a connection between eros, language, and the first poets to ever put words to the page.
She begins by drawing out a geometrical configura...more
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and a professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. While reading Eros the Bittersweet, her background in classical literature and ancient philosophy was clear and heavy: most of her argument centers on ancient writers. And, indeed, it is her goal to make a connection between eros, language, and the first poets to ever put words to the page.
She begins by drawing out a geometrical configura...more
I never read a book so beautiful with such a long and sustained focus on Sappho's poem where she describes love as bittersweet. This is a phenomenologist's delight for the author stays true to its motto, "To the things themselves."
Most books that try to link the structure of erotic desire to poetics often seem clinical and dry. I am thinking of Freud's work, here.
Instead, Anne Carson plays close attention to words, the spacings between them, punctuation. She demonstrates that there is something...more
Most books that try to link the structure of erotic desire to poetics often seem clinical and dry. I am thinking of Freud's work, here.
Instead, Anne Carson plays close attention to words, the spacings between them, punctuation. She demonstrates that there is something...more
I am currently on an Anne Carson binge. Like all great artists, she teaches you how to read her work. This 1986 essay is an essential read not only in light of her own work, but also in light of our own experiences with love. It goes far beyond the cliches on love and gets at their true, profound sources--that critical time when Greek writers and thinkers transitioned from oral to written language, and the result on that elusive, paradoxical creature called Eros. Reading this book is the equival...more
The average reader isn't going to find this plotless, erudite book interesting (but then, the average reader isn't poking around comments reviewing books by avant-garde poets and classicist scholars in the first place).
When reading this book, you may find it a little chilly and distant: not an enticing way to talk about love. Although some people get flayed, this is fair -- you won't find Henry Miller here. That distance, though, offers a necessary and valuable height from which Carson's earnest...more
When reading this book, you may find it a little chilly and distant: not an enticing way to talk about love. Although some people get flayed, this is fair -- you won't find Henry Miller here. That distance, though, offers a necessary and valuable height from which Carson's earnest...more
One of the most fascinating scholarly essays I have ever read.
I had to stop and think after every page; not only about her argument and myriad ideas (though that is enough to keep me up at night for some time), but about what else I need to read to catch up to her innumerable allusions and references. Her eight page bibliography is awe-inspiring to say the least!
As far as an investigation of Eros, this exceeded all expectation. Not only does she make her philosophical argument with a wealth of u...more
I had to stop and think after every page; not only about her argument and myriad ideas (though that is enough to keep me up at night for some time), but about what else I need to read to catch up to her innumerable allusions and references. Her eight page bibliography is awe-inspiring to say the least!
As far as an investigation of Eros, this exceeded all expectation. Not only does she make her philosophical argument with a wealth of u...more
What I truly enjoyed most about this book is how Carson ties together amorous feelings with the acts of reading of writing--love and learning both being acts of reaching out. I also was enthralled with her ideas of boundaries and edges--of love as a coming to understand the point at which things end, meet and the spaces between them. Carson observes,"It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is" (30). She answers,"Words have edges. So do...more
Aug 25, 2008
Kitty
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Anyone interested in language
Recommended to Kitty by:
JOE MILLAR/DORIANNE LAUX
Published in 1986, but timeless, probing. 14 chapters which spin from the opening call on Kafka's story, "The Top" and our delight in metaphor, and why we fall in love with love. "To be running, breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope." (xi) Anne Carson has an amazing knowledge and calls on original Greek language and thought, psychology, and multiple sources of literature: Sappho, Plato, Rilke, Tolstoy, Auden, Kundera. The title comes from the...more
Never one to waste words, even when using a lot of them, Canadian Poet Anne Carson provides the world with a must-read for understanding human lust and heartbreak from a lyrical and historical point of consideration. Yes, this is a scholarly and intellectual essay, and a little familiarity with its basis is helpful, but it's also a primer and a diving board into measured thought processes about that ever-present but elusive force, eros. Sweetbitter is much more like it, indeed.
A book on Eros that – for me – never takes wing. First read when it was published in 1986, just read it again as I'm rereading Sappho. Despite Carson's fine writing, there's more poetry in a few fragments of Sappho than in this entire book. There are some excellent observations along the way but the substance of the book is dry & thin — compared with (for example) the music of James Hillman on Eros, Roland Barthes on a lover's discourse, Roberto Calasso on Greek mythology.
"...an edge between two images that cannot merge in a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality--one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros."
To the side of philosophy, to the side of poetry, this book is a compiled web ethereal truisms and arcane textual enigmas, pointing fingers to the soft-spots of love, reading and the inextricable eruption of sentiment.
To the side of philosophy, to the side of poetry, this book is a compiled web ethereal truisms and arcane textual enigmas, pointing fingers to the soft-spots of love, reading and the inextricable eruption of sentiment.
I was alternately enthralled and bored by this book, and remain baffled as to how to categorize it.
It contains lovely, ephemeral passages that made me think in new ways about both the nature of eros and the classical poetry and philosophy Carson references -- how Eros exists in the moment of desire short of attainment, in the futile grasping of hands for the apple in Sappho's poem, in the pain and pleasure of holding ice described by Sophocles. Carson demonstrates beautifully that in literature,...more
It contains lovely, ephemeral passages that made me think in new ways about both the nature of eros and the classical poetry and philosophy Carson references -- how Eros exists in the moment of desire short of attainment, in the futile grasping of hands for the apple in Sappho's poem, in the pain and pleasure of holding ice described by Sophocles. Carson demonstrates beautifully that in literature,...more
I have to admit, I read this book because oh-so-literary characters on "The L Word" dropped the name while flirting. And again, I admit, I have also tried to talk about this book while hitting on women.
Why? Because this book, so thick with Carson's immense knowledge of classical literature, is also incredibly romantic.
To the Greeks, the idea of writing itself was relatively new. Instead of telling stories orally - a setting that allowed the listener and speaker a closeness with the words, beca...more
Why? Because this book, so thick with Carson's immense knowledge of classical literature, is also incredibly romantic.
To the Greeks, the idea of writing itself was relatively new. Instead of telling stories orally - a setting that allowed the listener and speaker a closeness with the words, beca...more
An intellectual and interesting look at how eros is explored in ancient poetry and philosophy from a scholar who obviously loves language. For more:
http://satiasreviews.blogspot.com/201...
This book was recommended to me by Regie Gibson.
http://satiasreviews.blogspot.com/201...
This book was recommended to me by Regie Gibson.
Jul 26, 2011
Eleanor
added it
Yes!
Triangles, cicadas, ancient understandings of love, lust, jealousy... and what love might be, or might be stretched between...
Triangles, cicadas, ancient understandings of love, lust, jealousy... and what love might be, or might be stretched between...
Jul 22, 2010
Rachel
marked it as to-read
I read about her latest book Vox in the New Yorker; and her project to bring the pagan world into our own.
This was my second time through this book, and it's well worth multiple reads. It depicts and explores a triangular relationship between self, the desired, and eros, as interpreted from Sappho, and extends analogously to the act of reading and writing, to aspiration for knowledge. Citing the original Greek all the way, Carson engages in conversation with Sappho's poems and Plato's Phaedrus, along with other texts from various periods of time in a luminous examination of eros and its expansive re...more
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A professor of the classics, with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published fifteen books as of 2010, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation...more
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“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 absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
—
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