Anne Carson Critical Essay | Critical Review by Barbara K. Gold

Critical Review by Barbara K. Gold

SOURCE: Gold, Barbara K. Review of Eros the Bittersweet, by Anne Carson. American Journal of Philology 111, no. 3 (fall 1990): 400-03.

In the following review, Gold comments that Carson neglects to draw on relevant feminist criticism while formulating her central argument in Eros the Bittersweet.

“Eros makes every man a poet” claims Plato in the Symposium, and indeed he might have been describing the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Carson, like Eros, is a mythoplokos, a weaver of tales to delight, amuse and perplex the reader, and her book is a trove of wordplay, puns, teasing titles, semantic games and epigrammatic twists. Carson's book, first published in 1986 and now reissued in paperback (1988), is an exploration of the characteristic properties of Eros and the relationship between desire, writing, reading and the structure of thought. Her 34 chapters, one of them as short as a single page, are cleverly...
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