Papers by Christopher Rollason
Tell-Tale Signs-Edgar Allan Poe and Bob Dylan: Hacia Un Modelo De Intertextualidad
Atlantis, revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, Dec 1, 2009
Babel A.F.I.A.L.: Aspectos de filología inglesa y alemana, 2009
Chapter 12. Opaque or User-friendly Language?
Chapter 3. The Use of Anglicisms in Contemporary French
Chapter 3. Unequal Systems: On the Problem of Anglicisms in Contemporary French Usage
The Detective Myth in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin Trilogy
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1988
This essay offers an analysis of Poe’s trilogy of tales centred on the detective C. Auguste Dupin... more This essay offers an analysis of Poe’s trilogy of tales centred on the detective C. Auguste Dupin: ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ (1842–3) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844),1 with the main emphasis on the first and last.
ES review, Dec 14, 2018
Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote, speaking of Franz Kafka, that writers are the creators of their... more Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote, speaking of Franz Kafka, that writers are the creators of their precursors, and certainly it is all but impossible today for anyone who has read Borges to read Edgar Allan Poe without the looming shadow of the great Argentinian. Poe's presence in Borges is at the same time but a part of a wider phenomenon of the US author's influence in Spanish America, extending to other celebrated writers such as Rubén Darío, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes. Equally, the Borges-Poe link is of a strength and solidity sufficient to justify the appearance, in the shape of the volume under review, of a book-length study. The relationship between the two writers has been the subject of critical attention over time, the academic state of play as at the end of last century being summarised in a contribution by Graciela E. Tissera to the multiauthor work Poe Abroad, edited by Lois Davis Vines and published in 1999. The extension and detail of Emron Esplin's study reflect the multidirectionality of existing and potential Poe-Borges scholarship, in the light of the ceaseless revisits to Poe made by Borges across his writing career. The author is more than qualified for such a task, as coeditor of the collective volume of 2014, Translated Poe, which, as its title suggests, takes the internationalisation of Poe as its watchword. There are multiple obvious similarities between the respective literary productions of Poe and Borges. Shared characteristics that might come to mind include: a cerebral and rational fascination with the bizarre and the fantastic; an emphasis on the literary work as made object or construct; and a career-long preference for brevity, for the short poem, the short story, the short nonfictional text (essay, prologue, review). At the same time, Borges's comments on and use of Poe exhibit a marked selectivity. His interest in the American writer focuses primarily on three aspects: Poe's detective fiction; his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; and his texts of literary theory, notably "The Philosophy of Composition." It is perhaps
The Character of Phantasm: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and Jorge Luis Borges' 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, 2009
... If a brief digression be allowed here regarding Poe's knowledge of Spanish language ... more ... If a brief digression be allowed here regarding Poe's knowledge of Spanish language and culture, we may note that his biographer Kenneth Silverman states that his modern languages studies at the ... Iwasaki, Fernando and Jorge Volpi 2008: 'Poe y Cía'. ... Rafael Olea Franco
Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose
The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2011
El genio de lo perverso: Ensayos del coloquio en conmemoración del bicentenario del natalicio de Edgar Allan Poe
The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2012
Oral Tradition, 2007
This paper aims to examine the relationship between Bob Dylan's work and the cultures, literature... more This paper aims to examine the relationship between Bob Dylan's work and the cultures, literatures, and musics of the Spanish-speaking world. The relationship is bidirectional, taking in Spanish and Latin American influences and themes in Dylan's production, as well as the influence and reception of that work in the Hispanophone universe. I further consider not only direct influences but also literary and musical parallels, and also briefly examine the translation of Dylan into Spanish. What I am offering is a casestudy in intercultural relations, not an excursion into theory, and I shall not be explicitly entering into issues of ethnoliterature, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, or translation studies. I do, however, stress by way of introduction that I believe Dylan's work is a particularly interesting case of a hybrid cultural object, the result of a fusion, not so much between a bipolarised "high" and "low" culture as between three different cultures-intellectual culture, mass culture, and folk or traditional culture. Much in Spanish and Latin American cultures, both literary and musical, is similarly--and fecundly--hybrid in its make-up, building bridges between the official culture and more popular elements. Meanwhile, today Spanish is one of the few languages that can seriously compete with English: as the transculturation scholar Dora Sales Salvador wrote in 2005, "both English and Spanish have taken on the role of global lingua franca as well as literary 2 I will here make two brief terminological clarifications. First, where I refer to "popular culture" I may, in accordance with context, be referring either to traditional (folk or artisan) culture, or to the broader field encompassing both that area and more recent mass culture: however, when I say "popular culture" I am using the term in a sense closer to Walter Benjamin than to Marshall McLuhan. Second, regarding the term "Latin America," I am aware that, in strict semantic terms, it includes Portuguese-speaking Brazil and French-speaking Haiti as well as the eighteen Spanish-speaking republics; I shall nonetheless, for the sake of convenience, use the term to mean "the Spanishspeaking territories in the Americas." It should also be noted that all translations of texts and titles from Spanish (and in one case Catalan) in this essay are my own. 3 All quotations from Dylan's lyrics are taken from Dylan 2004b. 4 See Dylan (1988:100). Prose text is not included in Dylan 2004b. 5 The text in Dylan (1988) omits the acute accent on the "o" of "López." 7 See my essay on this song, entitled '"Señor': A wasteland with no easy answers"
Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, May 12, 2007
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, 2009
This article shows how the poetry and prose of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) cast a long shadow ove... more This article shows how the poetry and prose of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) cast a long shadow over the work of America's greatest living songwriter, Bob Dylan (1941-). The work of both artists straddles the dividing-line between 'high' and 'mass' culture by pertaining to both: read through Poe, Dylan's work may be seen as a significant manifestation of American Gothic. It is further suggested, in the context of nineteenthcentury and contemporary debates on alleged 'plagiarism', that the textual strategy of 'embedded' quotation, as employed by both Poe and Dylan, points up the need today for an open and inclusive model of intertextuality.
Edgar Allan Poe, Julio cortázar and Paris: a study in doubling
The Grove, Dec 23, 2016
This essay examines the phenomenon of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2016 to the... more This essay examines the phenomenon of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2016 to the US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (born in 1941) and the worldwide controversy it has given rise to. After consideration of the history of the campaign and the various classes of objection (categorial, aesthetic, individual-centred, hardline left and identitarian), it is concluded that, given also the quality of Dylan's work, it is legitimate to award a Literature Nobel to a composer of songs.
The Character of Phantasm
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.
Globalisation and particularism in the work of José Saramago: the symbolism of the shopping-mall in "A caverna
... 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 ...
This article explores the presence in the work of the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (1941-... more This article explores the presence in the work of the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (1941-) of a series of motifs and references drawn from Hispanophone culture. While Dylan's work has long been positively received in the Spanish-speaking world, his songs and prose writings are shown to bear, among their multiple influences, a considerable Spanish and Latin American imprint. In particular, a number of literary intertextualities are examined, including, with particular reference to Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), whose combination of the popular and the surrealist is shown to anticipate aspects of Dylan's poetics.
Unearthing of Indian Writing In English: A Conversation
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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Papers by Christopher Rollason