So, Anne Carson came up as discussion at our breakfast table over the weekend. Sheepishly, I must admit that I have not read much of Anne Carson even though I had heard of her. However, I will say this. Consider this excerpt.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. It depends on light.
Any writer of that astonishing line as Anne Carson did write in one of her books — Autobiography of the Red — deserves the Nobel. Read that beautiful sentence again. It is as precious and passing as a sunlit frond on a tree on a beautiful walk. It is poetic. (Indeed, Carson is also often described fittingly as a Poet).
Nobel Prize website statement states that the prize was given…
“for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”
In this world of apparently personalized recommendations by hyper-curated algorithms, it is distressingly quite true that the engines still offer mundanely similar titles. Of course, people argue that an engine would give even better recommendations if it had the data on all the books you had read. But mostly, I don’t care if the recommended books work for me. I just love it if the recommendations offer something sufficiently fresh and intriguing to me. It has just become hard to discover books online and now I have resorted to wandering alleys and bookstores in old fashioned ways.
Every time the Nobel prize in Literature is given to a person whom I don’t know or haven’t read much, I rejoice. Because it opens a great opportunity to read someone new. I am more excited to learn about new ones, than sometimes when a favorite author of mine (eg. Han Kang) receives it. I love that about Nobel Prize in Literature. It is essentially an unpredictable but respected recommender. Learning about an author through prizes is far more interesting than buying a mystery book. Particularly, useful for old obstinate old fogies like me who often visit bookstores with a list in mind.
Victory is claimed by all, failure by one alone
Tacitus famously said eons ago.
While reading around encomiums for Anne Carson, I came across this factoid. She is trained as a classicist, and was a tenure track professor (i.e., Assistant Professor) at Princeton. From 1980 to 1987, Carson taught Classics at Princeton as an instructor and later assistant professor, but was not granted tenure at the end of her term. (The university spokesperson declined to confirm whether Carson was denied tenure.)
Despite the marketing-trained administrator’s nonplussed non-response on what I suppose was a denial of tenure, I think it is fair to say, even before the Nobel, the classics department thought Carson was a big deal. In 2025, she was invited to Princeton to deliver the Robert Fagles Lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts and was on the cover of their classics magazine. I am sure that someone at Princeton or a peer school wrote a letter recommending her to the Nobel committee. (Before my Penn colleague Emily Wilson’s translations of Odyssey and Iliad, I had only come across Fables translations on bookstore shelves).
All I wanted to point out how everyone now tries to reclaim Anne Carson’s legacy, now that she is famous and forever will be a Nobel Laureate. Princeton (ostensibly unconfirmed) denied tenure. The student-run The Daily Princetonian subtly pointed out to Princeton and all the readers, “Former Princeton assistant professor Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in Literature” making it clear that Princeton made the wrong call she left as an assistant professor.
After the denial, Carson taught at Emory for a year, and then was an associate professor at McGill University until McGill shut down its classics department and moved the rest of the un-canceled courses under the History department. I suppose STEM for the win. She was a bit of a traveling teacher, abiding by her love of Classics while writing more.
I loved her reaction too. While talking about the attention and about donating money, and on whether the prize would boost sales, Carson joked, “The publisher would hope so … I will have a sticker on my books”. Honestly, reminded be Doris Lessing’s reaction when she got the Nobel.
Honestly, Anne Carson kept at it, and the world is a much better for place because of her.
Discontents of Tenure
Tenure casts a long shadow of existence in academic lives. Unfortunately, academia can think of them as both important and trivial. It is a bit of widely held falsehood to believe that tenure decisions are often perfect. For sure, the bar is high, and the process is involved with many stages of feedback and evaluation. Yet, it is a summary of a person’s work over a short of period of our lives (typically 5-6 years). I have certainly been on tenure committee meetings where I have been on the “losing” side of the decisions. Since tenure decisions are necessarily opaque, we academics often stay quiet about decisions, regardless of whether we agree and disagree with the final outcome. (Sometimes it can feel like a bit of omerta if you ask me).
Often times, I have seen people who love their work, excel even more after the injustice of their decision and prove the world wrong. Certainly happened with Anne Carson and Katalin Kariko.
I hope the academics (including me) are humble enough to admit the imperfectness of the decision. One day, I wish someone would come out and say they were wrong about a famous denial. We are also sometimes wrong about tenure approvals, but that is entirely another can of worms. 🙂