Media365
5 min readOct 12, 2026 07:08 AM IST
First published on: Oct 12, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST
About six hours before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, I sent a text message about Anne Carson to a friend. I’d like to write about her, I told her, in case Carson won the prize. My temperament rebels against the bookie reader, those that place their bets on writers as if they were horses at a Derby. I’ve made bad jokes about prizes and their swayamvar-like air, the relay race of passing the halo that such recognition temporarily foists on writers. And yet I wrote that text.
A week before the announcement of the prize, I had begun teaching a class by showing my students a video of Anne Carson’s Stacks. In this course that I’ve called The Disobedient Women of the Essay, Carson has been — if we can tweak the phrase — writer-in-residence. We’ve had to turn to her often, whether discussing Joan Didion or Jane Gallop, Virginia Woolf or Susan Sontag, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber, Anahid Nersessian or Gillian Rose. We’re still a couple of weeks away from reading ‘The Glass Essay’, but Carson will visit our class again, I know, when we read Dubravka Ugrešić and Ann Patchett and Annie Dillard and Elisabeth Tova Bailey and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and other disobedient essayists. When my students — most of them women — and I read the essays, we annotate deviations, digressions and disruptions the essayists force on the corporatised hand-me-down version of the essay that gets an income and increments in media and academia. We will have a “Charter of Disobedience” by the end of the semester, we say, laughing. I am certain that in my notes — and my students’ — the most disobedient woman of them all will be Carson.
The disobedience began early — with a PhD that had the title Odi et Amo Ergo Sum (“I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am”). Her rejection of Descartes and the packaged ideas of rationalism that mark our conditioning in post-Enlightenment behaviour of thought and language is actually a rejection of masculinist categories such as the genre. And Carson has opposed the disciplinary tendencies of the genre with mighty inventiveness. Her first book was not a novel but a work of literary and philosophical criticism that derived from her doctoral dissertation. Eros the Bittersweet had a subtitle: “An Essay”. It’s a word — a category — that she would turn to repeatedly, to excavate, to inflate, to argue with, to demolish, to build antechambers, to rescue, to renovate, to rehabilitate.
In The Beauty of The Husband, an essay that includes narrative verse, the sections are named ‘tango’, after the partner dance form, ironic because its subject is a failed marriage. Her first book of poems combined art history and optical theory, while questioning the fundamental biases of post-Renaissance ideas of perspective. Then there’s ‘The Glass Essay’, a poem that she’s called a “lyric essay”, that is as much about her mother as it is about Emily Brontë; Autobiography of Red, a novel-in-verse that, like much of her writing, reimagines ancient Greek myths; Nox, an experimental accordion-fold art book for her estranged brother; Decreation, the title itself holds the spirit of her creative practice.
“I want to be unbearable.” There’s a sotto voce rage against the agents and engines of genre, representation and interpretation. She will not be reduced; Sappho will not be diminished. “I am not Descartes,” she declares. The small, the short, the stanza, the section — their forms of attention, disruption, distraction, and interruption have been the subject of a lifelong exploration. Carson was recognised for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”. She was “listening to the wind” in Iceland when the news came, she said. “Sometimes, what I end up writing about is just the way the light is… After the light, we could talk about my mother or what I’m having for dinner or Proust’s theory of translation.” A writer whose preoccupation with the honesty and fluidity of artistic form led her to explore the classics and the elemental world with surprise and devotion, Carson has made it possible for many of us to write without being forced to wear a genre’s uniform.
Roy, a poet and writer, is professor, Ashoka University. Views are personal
