Mailing List


Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

feature

July 2015

Rose McLaren

feature

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...

feature

May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

feature

May 2014

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

Like many people, I discovered Terry Castle through her essay on Susan Sontag Published in the London Review of Books in 2005, just a couple of months after Sontag’s death, it was an account of the two women’s ‘on-again, off-again, semi-friendship’ In a series of hilarious scenes, Castle makes good on her claim that Sontag was a ‘great comic character’ After skewering her subject, however, she comes full circle: Sontag, she admits at the end, had an enormous – unparalleled – influence on her, long before the two even met In its messy, conflicted way, it’s one of the finest tributes to anyone that I’ve read   The essay is a fitting introduction to Castle’s writing Many of her trademarks are there: the lists and overflowing cultural references, where Dame Edna and Debussy sit side by side; the fondness for italicising and capitalising phrases Most striking of all is her voice Self-deprecating, warm but not necessarily nice, at times gleefully excessive, it’s not the kind of thing one expects from an academic at Stanford (or, as Castle has described herself, ‘Spoiled Avocado Professor of English at Silicon Valley University’) It owes as much to stand-up comedy or Dorothy Parker as it does to literary criticism   Born in California in 1953, to British parents, Castle has been teaching at Stanford for three decades Her academic work has focused on the eighteenth-century novel and lesbian literature, in books such as The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), The Female Thermometer (1995) and The Literature of Lesbianism (2003), a monumental anthology that she edited In these works, and in her reviews for mainstream publications, she has produced shrewd, original criticism of great clarity This can be unexpectedly controversial: when the LRB put one of her essays on the cover with the headline ‘Was Jane Austen gay?’, the fallout continued on the letters page for months   Over the past two decades, Castle’s work has taken a more personal turn She has written a series of autobiographical essays incorporating a number of her fascinations – Agnes Martin, the saxophonist Art Pepper, the First World War These were brought together in The

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

feature

Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

feature

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

feature

February 2012

Rose McLaren

feature

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...

READ NEXT

Interview

January 2016

Interview with Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Roland Glasser

Interview

January 2016

Roof terrace of the Shangri-La hotel, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, USA; late afternoon, 8 October 2015. We ensconce ourselves in...

feature

March 2014

Burroughs in London

Heathcote Williams

feature

March 2014

I first met William Burroughs in 1963. I was working for a now defunct literary magazine called Transatlantic Review...

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...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required