• A black and white photograph of Hermann Gross holding a metalworking tool, with an in-progress sculpture before him.

Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions

A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…

Photograph of Jean-Luc Nancy

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jean-Luc Nancy

In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…

Hamish Henderson

Hamish Henderson and our Historical Moment

What’s the artist for in modern Scotland? Curating our accumulated history? Envisioning our possible and impossible futures? Diagnosing the ills of our present and prescribing treatment for the body politic? Showing us who we are, or who we ought to…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Maurice Blanchot

Marcel Proust once said, “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Friendship, and the role it plays in life, is an interesting and varied topic explored…

Improving Passions

Sentimentalism and the Musical at Eurovision 2017

The 2017 Eurovision Song Contest was won this year by Portugal’s entry, with a singer called Salvador Sobral, who sang a simple, heartfelt song of love and loss. Over and against the elaborate stage mechanics and outlandish attempts at eclecticism…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Ann Smock

Welcome to the not-so-sunny days of August where, in the perpetual spirit of celebrating OLR’s 40th anniversary, we are sharing the work of Ann Smock, currently Professor Emerita of French at the University of California. Perhaps best known for her…

George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination

What do you imagine when you think about great Catholic art? Perhaps you call to mind the gilded pages of illuminated medieval manuscripts and the glories of Renaissance painting and sculpture. Maybe you recall more recent cinematic masterpieces, such as…