Christine Brooke-Rose (1923–2012)
Auteur de Amalgamemnon
A propos de l'auteur
Christine Brooke-Rose taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988.
Crédit image: Carcanet Press
Œuvres de Christine Brooke-Rose
A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge Paperback Library) (1981) 16 exemplaires
Such 5 exemplaires
Ill wit and good humour: Women's comedy and the canon 2 exemplaires
The Foot 1 exemplaire
A structural analysis of Pound's Usura canto : Jakobson's method extended and applied to free verse (1976) 1 exemplaire
Gold: A Poem 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (1980) — Contributeur — 48 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom légal
- Brooke-Rose, Christine Frances Evelyn
- Date de naissance
- 1923-01-16
- Date de décès
- 2012-03-21
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- UK
- Lieu de naissance
- Geneva, Switzerland
- Lieu du décès
- near Avignon, France
- Lieux de résidence
- Brussels, Belgium
London, England, UK
Paris, France
Luberon, France - Études
- University of Oxford (Somerville College)
University College London - Professions
- teacher
novelist
memoirist
literary critic
translator - Relations
- Peterkiewicz, Jerzy (husband)
- Organisations
- University of Paris-Vincennes
- Courte biographie
- Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father and Swiss-American mother. Her first language was French, but the family also spoke English and German. Her parents separated in 1929 and she moved with her mother to Brussels, and then to the UK. During World War II, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and worked at the secret facility of Bletchley Park as an intelligence officer, assessing intercepted German communications. After the war, she read English at Oxford University and earned a Ph.D. in Middle English from University College London in 1954. She worked for a time in London as a literary journalist and scholar. Her debut novel, The Languages of Love, was published in 1957. In 1968, she moved to France, where she taught linguistics and English literature at the University of Paris-Vincennes. In 1975, she was named professor of American literature and literary theory. Other novels included Out (1964); Such (1966), for which she shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction; and the autobiographical Remake (1996).
Her literary criticism included A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976); A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981); and A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971). She was also well-known as a translator of French works into English, in particular the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet. She retired from teaching in 1988 and went to live in the south of France. She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, and to Claude Brooke.
Membres
Critiques
Amalgamemnon (British Literature) par Christine Brooke-Rose
Says nothing, but in a very clever way. There is endless wordplay on display here, things like saying "figital disputer" instead of digital computer. Not nearly as bad as it sounds, often quite lyrical. In a year, though, I'm going to remember nothing about this novel.
as the name implies, it's not quite the usual approach to an introductory text, but it's still definitely for the student; i'm sure this book would be useless to a Pound expert.
most importantly, it presents an alternative approach WITHOUT (usually) catching the Pound Bug, i.e. lapsing into his anti-logic and idiosyncratic voice, which so many other not-quite-scholars did at the time.
Brooke-Rose fully admits that she puts you in medias res, but it's fully calculated..... whereas Pound does it blusteringly and unintentionally, because he infamously couldn't explain things, he could only re-explain, as if you heard it already but were too stupid to get it.
instead of becoming the victim of an unprovoked attack, i usually just felt swept along in Brooke-Rose's enthusiasm, which is rare to find in Pound criticism without accompaniment by excessive apology or defensiveness.… (plus d'informations)
most importantly, it presents an alternative approach WITHOUT (usually) catching the Pound Bug, i.e. lapsing into his anti-logic and idiosyncratic voice, which so many other not-quite-scholars did at the time.
Brooke-Rose fully admits that she puts you in medias res, but it's fully calculated..... whereas Pound does it blusteringly and unintentionally, because he infamously couldn't explain things, he could only re-explain, as if you heard it already but were too stupid to get it.
instead of becoming the victim of an unprovoked attack, i usually just felt swept along in Brooke-Rose's enthusiasm, which is rare to find in Pound criticism without accompaniment by excessive apology or defensiveness.… (plus d'informations)
Imagine for a moment that you're an experimental novelist with a strong, if not widely publicised, commitment to avoiding external narrators and past-tense narrative. You're about to set out on what may well turn out to be your last novel. What to choose for a setting? How about a story that starts around 4.5 billion years ago and ends about 10 000 years ago? If you can avoid the past tense and the panoramic view there, then you've probably exhausted that particular constraint...
Displaying no shortage of chutzpah, Brooke-Rose sets out to produce a literary treatment of the story of life on Earth, from the formation of the first complex molecules ("...earthfarts in slithery clay") to early human societies that are on the verge of developing agriculture. Obviously, this isn't straightforward. How do you tell a story in which consciousness itself is a meaningless concept until about halfway through the book, whilst language and the first named characters only start to appear in Chapter 13, and uncountable generations of life are still passing between one chapter and the next, right up to the end of the book?
There's a certain amount of linguistic sleight of hand involved, of course, and Brooke-Rose has to bring in the concept of "the Code" — which seems to mean the aggregate of the information stored up in all the planet's DNA — to give some sort of narrative continuity to the story. An appropriate enough image for a writer who started her working life at Bletchley Park. She's also fairly strict about not using conventional names for things like plant and animal species the first few times they appear in the story. We have to work out that something is a tree or a brontosaurus or a honey-bee from a description. Equally, there are no place-names: sometimes in the later chapters we can guess where we are, but in the earlier part of the book geography doesn't help us much, even with the help of the period maps in the cover art.
It all works surprisingly well, and it did prompt me a couple of times to wonder about things I thought I knew — there's quite a lot about the competition for resources between homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and about how male and female roles might have evolved, and about how some key bits of technology might have been invented and lost many times over — but on the whole it is probably the sort of book that is more interesting for the writer than for the reader. If you haven't read at least some of the sort of science books Brooke-Rose lists in her bibliography, you'll probably be a bit lost in the text; if you have, you're probably not the sort of person who reads experimental novels...… (plus d'informations)
Displaying no shortage of chutzpah, Brooke-Rose sets out to produce a literary treatment of the story of life on Earth, from the formation of the first complex molecules ("...earthfarts in slithery clay") to early human societies that are on the verge of developing agriculture. Obviously, this isn't straightforward. How do you tell a story in which consciousness itself is a meaningless concept until about halfway through the book, whilst language and the first named characters only start to appear in Chapter 13, and uncountable generations of life are still passing between one chapter and the next, right up to the end of the book?
There's a certain amount of linguistic sleight of hand involved, of course, and Brooke-Rose has to bring in the concept of "the Code" — which seems to mean the aggregate of the information stored up in all the planet's DNA — to give some sort of narrative continuity to the story. An appropriate enough image for a writer who started her working life at Bletchley Park. She's also fairly strict about not using conventional names for things like plant and animal species the first few times they appear in the story. We have to work out that something is a tree or a brontosaurus or a honey-bee from a description. Equally, there are no place-names: sometimes in the later chapters we can guess where we are, but in the earlier part of the book geography doesn't help us much, even with the help of the period maps in the cover art.
It all works surprisingly well, and it did prompt me a couple of times to wonder about things I thought I knew — there's quite a lot about the competition for resources between homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and about how male and female roles might have evolved, and about how some key bits of technology might have been invented and lost many times over — but on the whole it is probably the sort of book that is more interesting for the writer than for the reader. If you haven't read at least some of the sort of science books Brooke-Rose lists in her bibliography, you'll probably be a bit lost in the text; if you have, you're probably not the sort of person who reads experimental novels...… (plus d'informations)
In typical CBR fashion, this is simultaneously a very serious attempt to say something important about the nature of narrative and a joke at the expense of the conventions of literary criticism. Because this turns out to be not the usual, quasi-random collection of essays assembled over a period of years on different topics that the format teaches us to expect, but instead an extended critical study of that widely-overlooked modern novelist, Christine Brooke-Rose.
Hardly anyone, it turns out, has noticed or made any proper attempt to discuss the specific technical aspect of her novels that she herself considers the most interesting, the way they use grammatical constraints to break out of stale, conventional ways of writing narrative. She did explain it all to one person, apparently (her new boss at Vincennes, Hélène Cixous), and that person did write an article about it in 1968, but seems to have done so without actually reading the books and thus got it all wrong...
The discussion of the constraints, where they came from and what she was hoping to achieve with them is very interesting, and clears up a few little mysteries for me — but I'm glad I read all the novels first. If you read a novel conscious that there's a specific "trick" behind it (as with La disparation or B.S. Johnson's The unfortunates) you end up spending more time looking at how it's done rather than at what the trick actually does for the book as a novel.
Another book that comes with an implied reading-list: not only critical texts and books about language that I haven't read, but also some of the authors Brooke-Rose talks about as important influences, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. The discussion of House of leaves in the last chapter makes that sound interesting too...… (plus d'informations)
Hardly anyone, it turns out, has noticed or made any proper attempt to discuss the specific technical aspect of her novels that she herself considers the most interesting, the way they use grammatical constraints to break out of stale, conventional ways of writing narrative. She did explain it all to one person, apparently (her new boss at Vincennes, Hélène Cixous), and that person did write an article about it in 1968, but seems to have done so without actually reading the books and thus got it all wrong...
The discussion of the constraints, where they came from and what she was hoping to achieve with them is very interesting, and clears up a few little mysteries for me — but I'm glad I read all the novels first. If you read a novel conscious that there's a specific "trick" behind it (as with La disparation or B.S. Johnson's The unfortunates) you end up spending more time looking at how it's done rather than at what the trick actually does for the book as a novel.
Another book that comes with an implied reading-list: not only critical texts and books about language that I haven't read, but also some of the authors Brooke-Rose talks about as important influences, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. The discussion of House of leaves in the last chapter makes that sound interesting too...… (plus d'informations)
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 29
- Aussi par
- 7
- Membres
- 613
- Popularité
- #41,002
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 19
- ISBN
- 47
- Langues
- 1
- Favoris
- 4