Papers by Christopher Rollason
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The Grove, Dec 23, 2016
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The traces of Edgar Allan Poe in the work of Jorge Luis Borges have long been recognised, but bot... more The traces of Edgar Allan Poe in the work of Jorge Luis Borges have long been recognised, but both in the Argentinian writer's own hands and others', comment has tended to concentrate on three areas of the American author's work, namely: the detective fiction; the novel Arthur Gordon Pym; and Poe's literary theory. This paper will explore another facet, i.e. the possible intertextual relations and parallels between Poe's tales of terror and Borges' admired metaphysical fictions. The side-by-side examination of 'The Fall of the House of Usher', Poe's most celebrated Gothic tale, and 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', Borges' fable of the intellectual attraction of an imaginary planet, reveals significant links, both overt and covert, between Borges' tale and Poe's, highlighting the seductively similar yet also strikingly divergent forms in which both writers privilege the textual and intertextual in exploring and developing the concept of a parallel reality.
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... The present version is the same as the Vigo text except that the quotations in English from S... more ... The present version is the same as the Vigo text except that the quotations in English from Saramago's novel are now taken from the ... of a nameless city in an unnamed country; if there is anything Portuguese about it, it is only the protagonists' names - the potter Cipriano Algor ...
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Quest, 2008
ABSTRACT: A conversation between India scholars Christopher Rollason and Ludmila Volná (interview... more ABSTRACT: A conversation between India scholars Christopher Rollason and Ludmila Volná (interviewees) and Dr Nilanshu Agarwal of Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli(interviewer). The conversation roams over multiple issues of Indian Writing in English - the writing ...
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Seva Bharati Journal of English Studies, 4 (March), …, 2008
... the figure of £1.4 million (from Little, Brown), calling it 'the biggest non-fiction adv... more ... the figure of £1.4 million (from Little, Brown), calling it 'the biggest non-fiction advance in publishing history' (Vikram Seth/Alexander Masters, Daily Telegraph interview, 1). 19 Seth/Masters, 2. 20 Uma Nair, Newzin review (Internet reference). 21 In The Golden Gate, the author ...
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The Edgar Allan Poe Review
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The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2016
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The Edgar Allan Poe Review
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In and Out of English, 2005
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The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2009
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Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, 2011
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The theme of South Asian individuals being caught up in and having their lives reshaped by major ... more The theme of South Asian individuals being caught up in and having their lives reshaped by major collective historical events (such as Independence and Partition) has been a constant in postcolonial Indian Writing in English, in such key works as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines or Manju Kapur's own Difficult Daughters. In A Married Woman (2002), the second of her three novels and the only one so far to incorporate public concerns into a contemporary setting, Kapur focuses on, among other themes, the Hindu-Muslim conflict as crystallised around the Ayodhya/Babri Masjid issue. This novel has attracted attention for its frank depiction of a love affair between two women, but less attention has been paid to the historical and political context in which that relationship develops. Kapur boldly returns to the Ramayana's sense of a beginning by initiating the transgressive relationship in Ayodhya, in the wake of an anti-communalist ...
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This essay appeared in Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy": An Anthology of Recent Criti... more This essay appeared in Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy": An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. Murari Prasad, New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005, 62-88. It is a revised and updated version of an article first published in The Atlantic Literary Review (Delhi), Vol. 3, No. 3, July-September 2002, 69-95, and also on-line at: <http://www.doononline.net/pages/info_features/features_spotlights/spotlights/seth/sethpaper.pdf>. A slightly different version appeared in Indias Abroad: the Diaspora Writes Back, ed. Rajendra Chetty and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Johannesburg (South Africa): STE Publishers 2004, 170-186.
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Vikram Chandra's first two works of fiction the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) and t... more Vikram Chandra's first two works of fiction the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) and the volume of short stories Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) – immediately won him recognition among readers, fellow writers and critics as a modern storyteller in an age-old Indian tradition a latter-day exponent of a very ancient art whose canonic examples include the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and, indeed, the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, many of which are believed to be of Indian origin. In both books, there is a storyteller who tells stories to an audience, and also an audience that talks back. Red Earth and Pouring Rain offers the reader a Chinese-box structure of stories within stories, framed within the nonnaturalistic circumstance of the displaced poet Sanjay, reincarnated as a talking and writing white monkey telling tales of nineteenth-century India. Love and Longing in Bombay is structured as a sequence of stories narrated by the character Shiv Subramaniam – the f...
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Papers by Christopher Rollason
Dylan has always been at the interface between high culture and popular culture, referencing 'the green pastures of Harvard University' on his debut album alongside covers of folk and blues material. In 1965 he offered the line 'Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll' as an image of the meeting of elite and popular art, following it up years later in 2009 with 'I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver and I'm reading James Joyce'. Dylan is, like his character Mr Jones, 'very well read, it's well known' – or, in the words from ‘Love Minus Zero’ which give this book its title, one of those who ‘read books, repeat quotations’ - and his sources include canonic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman or William Blake.
The literary dimension of the high-cultural/mass-cultural dichotomy straddled by Dylan has since the Nobel been further burnished by the recent studies by Richard Thomas and Andrew Muir of Dylan's use of, respectively, the Greco-Roman classics and Shakespeare. The various debates around 'plagiarism versus intertextuality' concerning the likes of Junichi Saga and Henry Timrod have also served to highlight Dylan's recourse to obscure literary sources. Creative writers have meanwhile woven Dylan allusions into their own work.
The notion of a 'literary Dylan' also extends to the detailed analysis of his song texts. In the wake of Gray, critical authorities such as Stephen Scobie, Christopher Ricks and the late Aidan Day have applied the resources of literary analysis to demonstrate that Dylan's writing richly exhibits the characteristics – complexity, ambiguity, figures of speech, multiple interpretability – of the traditional literary or poetic text as taught in faculties of English.
The essays that follow in this volume are offered as a modest contribution to the storehouse of Dylan lore. I begin with a discussion of the Nobel and its reception, and go on to offer a series of lyric analyses ranging across Dylan's writing career. I then consider two case studies regarding Dylan and individual authors, namely the influence on Dylan of Edgar Allan Poe and, conversely, the influence of Dylan on Salman Rushdie. Finally, I conclude with an examination of the state and prospects of Dylan Studies at the present time, looking towards whatever future awaits us in what Dylan himself has called our 'shadowy world'.
The aim is to present a new reading of Poe's texts which rejects traditional "unity"-based interpretations. The thesis privileges the psychological dimension, but in textual, not biographical terms; it stresses the tales' often undervalued element of modernity as well as their receptiveness to emergent processes and discourses.
The psychological dimensions analysed include: the explicit presentation of mental splitting ('William Wilson') and institutionalised madness ('The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether'); the signification of alienation ('The Man of the Crowd') and self-destruction('The Imp of the Perverse', 'The Black Cat', 'The Tell-Tale Heart')as constitutive of the subject at a determinate historical moment; the simultaneous and subversion of mythical signifiers of an illusory "full" subject, both metonyms (the detective, the mesmerist) and metaphors (the artwork, the interior); the symbolic emergence from repression of active female desire, perceived as threatening in the male unconscious ('The Oval Portrait', 'Ligeia');and the disintegration of the subject under the pressure of its own repressions ('The Fall of the House of Usher').
Particular stress is laid throughout on the textual undermining of the dividing-lines between "normal" and "abnormal", "sane" and "insane”, “respectable" and "criminal". Particular stress is laid throughout on the textual undermining of the dividing-lines between "normal" and "abnormal", "sane" and "insane", "respectable" and "criminal". It is concluded that Poe's work constitutes a map of the vicissitudes and contradictions of subjectivity in patriarchal culture; from the study of these texts, the "I" emerges as formed out of a massive repression and as therefore constantly liable to fragmentation and rupture .
The text that we have, although written in the first half of the twentieth century, has, paradoxically, to be seen as a recently released cultural phenomenon that still needs to be absorbed by historians, literary critics, art critics, philosophers and sociologists: if the German edition did not appear till well into the twentieth century's second half, the book burst on the English-speaking world only as the century was in its death-throes. In the brief time of its existence so far, the English version, published by Harvard University Press, has been received with near-universal enthusiasm and admiration by readers and critics.
What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron, typically linking two parallel streets and consisting of two facing rows of shops and other commercial establishments - restaurants, cafés, hairdressers, etc. "Arcade" is the English name: in French the arcades are known as "passages", and in German as "Passagen". The modern arcade was invented in Paris, and the Parisian arcades remain the type of the phenomenon.
Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a German publication of 1852, which sums up the arcades' essence: "These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need".
Translated from Portuguese - author: Olga Pombo
Publisher: Nodus Publikationen, Münster, Germany