Abstract

COLES, Elizabeth. The Sacred Object: Anne Carson and Simone Weil. Acta poét [online]. 2013, vol.34, n.1, pp.127-154. ISSN 2448-735X.

This paper examines the relationship between critical reading and the critical object in the work of the contemporary Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, principally the texts that emerge from her long-standing engagement with the writings of philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil. My reading of Carson addresses the conflicting desires of critical relationship that go confessed and unconfessed in her work, and the forms of intimacy her responses are able to achieve with the Weil oeuvre. Sharpened by their encounter with Weil's thinking and with her faith, Carson's questions for criticism -on its own objects and their resistance to interpretation, on the criticism/literature distinction, and on the vanity of criticism's aesthetics- find articulation in various genres of writing. Studying the complicity of each of these with Weil and the capacity of each to radicalize her concerns, brings my paper toward some conclusions of its own for literary criticism.

Keywords : Anne Carson; Simone Weil; interpretation; literary criticism; contemporary poetry; theology; mysticism.