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

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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....

Two hundred names are inscribed in a totemic list that opens Alice Oswald’s Memorial The deaths of the Greek heroes, recounted over 400 pages in the Iliad, are stunningly compressed across four double pages Their deaths are a foregone conclusion; but their capitalised names, framed by the blankness of the page, carry the hefty weight of each man’s life The second part of the poem, which recounts the heroes’ often unheroic traits, lays bare the insanity of war; the blind momentum that turns a man into ‘a terrible numbness / Turned inside-out and taking over everything’ In the Homeric myth, war is second nature, a duty assumed by the warrior, undeterred by the destruction reaped Soldiers ‘hurried to darkness’, race into the arms of death, the noble seal of defending one’s country For Simone Weil, writing on the eve of the Second World War, there was no terrible beauty to be born of combat War, that supposed leveller of class and race, is seen as a systematic machine that levels interiority and petrifies everyone in its midst In Oswald’s poem each forsaken soldier is given their due, which is to say, their doomed leave-taking In the Greek myths death is the unflinching end, the future for the soldier born under its sign The Greeks conducted wars, Weil writes, as ‘geometricians of virtue We are only geometricians of matter,’ or as Marco Roth writes in a recent essay, ‘drone philosophers’   In modern times, peace is seen as the ultimate, if unrealistic, goal; warfare is, if inescapable, an aberration Just as the notion of heroism died a collective death in the wake of that grand misnomer, the Great War, the horror of combat has become such a worn truism that it seems to carry little more traction that the jarring jingoism of Glory, Sacrifice and Patriotism excoriated by the First World War poets who saw that the unknown soldier would reap ‘no dividends from time’s tomorrow’ There had been military catastrophes in the past – the Charge of the Light Brigade – but these were seen as indictments of military strategy, rather than a

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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feature

June 2016

Heteronormativity and the Single Mother

Jacinda Townsend

feature

June 2016

I.   This spring, in cities and towns all over the United States, schools, churches and other organisations will...

Art

November 2016

The Green Ray

Agnieszka Gratza

Art

November 2016

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Walt Whitman, Leaves...

feature

Issue No. 11

Literature in a Distracted Era

Adam Thirlwell

feature

Issue No. 11

There are two categories in the literary system I’d like to celebrate at high speed: the lonely writer, and...

 

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