Making art relies on a process of intuitive discovery that begins prior to knowing and overrides intention. Anne Carson and the Unknown delves into the varied ways the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson engages with the unknown, both as a philosophical concept and as a method of creative practice. Bringing together various contemporary perspectives, ranging from the world of quantum physics to feminist literary criticism and media studies, this volume considers how contemporary poets like Anne Carson continue to show the relevance of the unknown in our turbulent times of global upheaval.

It covers Carson’s unusual travelogue about the collapse of civilizations and knowledge, positions her oeuvre in the context of a wider debate on post-critique, and reads her work as an engagement with a radically formalist Classics that goes back to ancient Greek’s etymological complexity. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the volume dives into her work’s ambiguous relationships with trans experience and religion, the centrality of the psychoanalytical concept of the caesura, and her use of figures like Helen of Troy and Herakles. It also discusses the unknown as a visual mechanism in her recent creative collaboration with comics creator Rosanna Bruno. In this way, Carson provides a necessary counter to both Western scientific knowledge’s goals of predictability and rationality, and to the algorithmic certitudes sought by the engineering culture of technologists who prevail today.

Helena Van Praet is an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, Belgium.

Christine Wiesenthal is Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.