Anne CarsonVerre, ironie et Dieu

Anne Carson’s third published book, Verre, Ironie et Dieu (Glass, Irony and God) is a collection of texts in a variety of genres, all traversed by the same critical and feminist perspective: verse narrative (mixing a rereading of Wuthering Heights with scenes from everyday life), theological-philosophical poems, parodic reportage, pseudo-journey guide, imitation of a biblical text, theoretical essay… In Le genre des sons, which brings the book to a close, Anne Carson examines the moral values traditionally attributed to sounds, and in particular to the female voice, so often disparaged. Based on a reading of ancient texts, her analysis sheds light on the whole book in retrospect: “It is largely on the basis of the sounds people make that we judge them to be sane or insane, male or female, good, bad, reliable, depressed, marriageable, moribund, likely or not to wage war against us, hardly superior to animals, inspired by God. Reading these few lines and the whole of this book, which was first published in 1995, we can see, a few decades later, the importance of his innovative vision for both gender studies and contemporary poetic approaches.