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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

‘When I arrived in Paris for school, all these bourgeois kids would say Eddy Bellegueule, what a funny name’   A year before the publication of his internationally acclaimed first novel, The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis edited a collection of essays in homage to the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu Like Bourdieu, Louis identifies as a ‘transfuge de classe’, which can translate as something between class-crossover and class ‘defector’: someone who has been impelled by class humiliation to transcend their social identity In the collection’s opening essay, Louis describes the ‘folie sociale’ (social madness) which took him over after moving to Paris in his late teens, when he started actively and obsessively pursuing entry into the capital’s most selective milieux out of a desire to erase his modest social origins Bourdieu’s work on social distinction and class identity — which describe his own successive social reinventions — informed Louis’s own writing on that transfer; it also influenced the work of two of Louis’s contemporaries and literary models, Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux, who each contributed an essay to the collection Like Louis, Eribon and Ernaux have written about their respective transfers from poverty to middle-class life through their access to education and, later, to writer status Bourdieu wrote, referring to Flaubert, of his own futile desire to ‘live all the lives in one life’ All these writers, too, address their ambitions to live multiple lives at once, and interrogate the problematic nature of that ambition All are confronting a complex problem: is it possible to write about the transcendence of working-class condition in a way that is not effectively betrayal, or an implicit praise of bourgeois life?   I grew up in a Picardy town about 100 km west from Louis’s home village of Hallencourt, and many moments in Louis’s autobiographical novel take me straight back to childhood: the image, for example, of three children riding a single bike around a stone structure commemorating the dead of the First World War, the kind that peppers the landscape of so many towns in northern France

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Art

August 2016

False shadows

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Daisy Lafarge

poetry

September 2016

siphoning   habitual catalogue of the day, intro ft. blossom fallen from a gated property and crisping on the...

fiction

Issue No. 6

Stolen Luck

Helen DeWitt

fiction

Issue No. 6

Keith was not the songwriter. Darren and Stewart wrote the songs. Keith hit things, some of which were drums....

 

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