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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

At her death in 2004, Brazilian author Hilda Hilst had received a number of her country’s important literary prizes and published more than two dozen books of poetry, drama and fiction What many Brazilians immediately thought of in conjunction with her name, however, was the notoriety generated by what critics labelled Hilst’s ‘pornographic’ tetralogy of the years 1990-1992, with the novel Letters from a Seducer generally considered the masterpiece of the four Yet the charge of pornography, which Hilst did not disavow, hardly approaches her deep skill and artistry in drawing from and upon a mode that might appear inimical to art In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst employs multiple discourses, styles, forms, and registers, including those of the libertine epistolary tradition, evoking works by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, as well as by modernist antecedents and later twentieth century models, to create a postmodern polyphonic text that surpasses the limits of the conventional realist novel Unfolding in three parts, beginning with letters from a wealthy, depraved socialite, named Karl, to his cloistered sister, Cordélia, then shifting to a series of stories by a near-homeless graphomane named Stamatius (‘Tiu’), and concluding with even briefer fragments extracted, like atomic particles, from the ‘hollows’ of the imagination, the novel suggests that perhaps the greatest seducer of all is language and its manifold (im)possibilities What becomes ever clearer as we proceed through this novel is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that ‘ethics and aesthetics’ are one —JK   *   How to think about pleasure wrapped up in this crap? In mine This discomfort of knowing myself raggedy and covered with sores, your hair growing long in the crotch, if you dare think about it, and then around the hair a stew of wounds, I do dare think about it I tell myself, my mouth toothless because of all the stress and strains and addiction, I dare think about it and they don’t forgive that Then I take hold of your pubes and your pussy, pound them, your cry is high, hard, a whip, a bone, there’s debris all over the

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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poetry

Issue No. 18

Two New Poems

Dorothea Lasky

poetry

Issue No. 18

Do You Want To Dip The Rat   Do you want to dip the rat Completely in oil  ...

feature

October 2013

The Good Soldier

Jess Cotton

feature

October 2013

Two hundred names are inscribed in a totemic list that opens Alice Oswald’s Memorial. The deaths of the Greek heroes,...

poetry

February 2013

Redacted, Redacted

Les Kay

poetry

February 2013

Here the censorship, which you’ve taught yourself, is self-inflicted (low sugar, low fat); it begins with the swinging shadow...

 

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