Week 11 – Carson

Photography and Fiction

In Monique Tschofen’s article, “‘First I Must Tell about Seeing’: (De)monstrations of Visuality and the Dynamics of Metaphor in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red”, she recounts her interview with Anne Carson. It was interesting to discover that Carson had originally considered herself a painter, but the titles of her drawings turned longer until they became lengthy text. It is like she turned to writing because she did not perform well as a visual artist. Her former desire to become a visual artist emerges in her highly visual text. Carson’s anecdote about how she switched from visual art to writing highlights a new relation between image and text, one where text is capable of spilling over an image and vice versa.

In McCallum’s article “Toward a Photography of Low: the Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red”, she notes interestingly how the Romance chapter ending includes verbal descriptions of scenarios rather than visual images, thus using ekphrasis in lieu of real photographs. Carson plays with the idea of ekphrasis by switching between what appears to be descriptions of the photographs to more ambiguous captions; some of the chapters contain first line that appear to be a description of a photograph, but other chapters contain non-ekphrastic descriptions.