Christine Brooke-Rose

Abstract

Christine Brooke-Rose (b. 1923 – d. 2012) was a writer and academic whose work contributed greatly to the development of British experimental writing, postmodern literature, and poststructuralist theory. She was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to a Swiss-French mother (Evelyn Brooke) and English father (Alfred Northbrook Rose). She was to live her life between the two cultures, English and French, and her work was an important crossing point for literary-critical influence. She lived in Belgium until the age of eighteen, before coming to England to study at Somerville College, Oxford. She completed her PhD at the University of London, and her thesis became her first scholarly work, A Grammar of Metaphor, in 1958 (see Academic Work). She served at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and established herself as a popular, satirical novelist in the postwar years. Her turn to experimental writing during the 1960s was inspired by the French nouveaux romanciers (including Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute) and placed her alongside novelists like B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Eva Figes, and Alan Burns who sought to overturn the realist presumptions of British postwar writing. In 1968 she moved to Paris to teach at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes, where she stayed for the rest of her working life. At Vincennes she worked alongside key figures of poststructuralism including Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, and Gerard Genette. Her study of their theoretical work added to her prior interest in structuralist theorists including Algirdas Julien Greimas, Roman Jakobson, and Tzvetan Todorov. After the commercial failure of her theory-inflected novel, Thru, she turned her attentions exclusively to her academic writing and critical work for nine years. She had some influence on British critics like Frank Kermode in softening attitudes to French theory (according to letters held in the Harry Ransom Archive) and on American academics who, by the 1980s, were beginning to adopt structuralism and poststructuralism as primary modes of analysis. Despite working closely with these theories, Brooke-Rose remained skeptical of her fellow literary theorists’ more extravagant social and epistemological claims. In particular, she remained committed to science as a method of analysis, visible in her science fiction works (Out, 1964; Such, 1966; Xorandor, 1986; and Verbivore, 1990) and her novel of deep history, Subscript (1999). By the end of her life, Brooke-Rose was engaged in finding new forms of autobiographical and memoir writing, the influence of which is only now beginning to be felt. Brooke-Rose’s writing remained consistently ahead of its time throughout her life. By making her books more readily available, the Internet and print-on-demand technologies have enabled a resurgence of interest in her work.