Eros the Bittersweet
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| Author | Anne Carson |
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| Language | English |
| Genre |
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| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Publication date | 1986 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Awards | Modern Library: 100 Best Nonfiction Books (Reader's List) |
| ISBN | 9780608027401 |
Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986) is the first book of criticism by the Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and classicist Anne Carson.
A reworking of her 1981 doctoral thesis Odi et Amo Ergo Sum ("I Hate and I Love, Therefore I Am"),[1] Eros the Bittersweet "laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications, […] formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output",[2] and establishing her "style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature".[3]
The book traces the concept of eros in ancient Greece through its representations in writings of the time. It examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain, as exemplified by a word of Sappho's creation: "glukupikron" (the "bittersweet" of the book's title).[4]
Carson considers how triangulations of desire appear in the writings of Sappho, ancient Greek novelists (Longus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Chariton), and Plato (in his Phaedrus).[5][6] Her analysis of Sappho's Fragment 31 sees "eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence – […] eros as lack."[7]
