This essay argues that traditional notions of literary value cannot account for the work of the contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson because her poetry needs to be situated in the context of the emergence of a new form of economic value in the age of financial derivatives. The article discusses the process of reading this new singular orthography, while also revealing how an ethical reading practice has consequences for the way we encounter borders, read transnational literatures, and formulate ourselves. Similar to Jacques Derrida’s notion of téléiopoièse, and Gayatri Spivak’s “teleopoiesis,” this passive ethics of reading emphasizes being made rather than making. “The Glass Essay” coins the word “whaching,” a contingent practice-sometimes meaning one open question, sometimes another. Carson’s poetry tells us that our affective relationships to texts have consequences outside the texts her work suggests that loving texts, and knowing how to read them, honoring that love, is an ethical encounter. Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” is an example of her larger body of work, which often stages conversations between a lyric I-a speaker who is not only the speaking subject in the poem but also a reader of other poems-and a body of past literature. By examining the ways readers are figured within poetry, we can gain insight into reading and ethics on multiple scales. To consider what literature can teach us about ethics, and how it teaches us, this essay focuses on the figure of the reader. The term “ethical reading practice” suggests a way of reading and responding to literature responsibly and carefully, ultimately producing a generative encounter with the text, which has implications far outside the text.

This essay seeks to define a twenty-first-century ethical reading practice.

Anne carson glass