Christine Brooke-Rose

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Christine Brooke-Rose (born January 16, 1923 in Geneva , † March 21, 2012 in Cabrières-d'Avignon , Département Vaucluse ) was a British writer who was celebrated by literary criticism for her experimental novels and as a representative of the concrete and visual Poetry as well as the minimalist definition is viewed in the fantastic .

Life

Second World War and studies

Christine Brooke-Rose, daughter of an English father and a Swiss - American mother, learned French , English and German in her childhood . Her parents separated in 1929, and after her father died in 1934, she moved with her mother to Brussels and then to Great Britain in 1936.

During the Second World War she served as an officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and as one of the women in Bletchley Park at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) , she dealt with the assessment of intercepted messages of the German Wehrmacht . In her later memoir, Remake (1996), she gave a non-chronological account of her experiences there, describing Bletchley Park (BP) as "a first training of the mind, a first university '). Ultimately, these experiences helped her become a novelist and enabled her to become aware of other people's viewpoints. In Bletchley Park she also met Rodney Bax, whom she married in 1944. However, this marriage was annulled before the end of the year .

In 1948, Christine Brooke-Rose and the Polish writer Jerzy Peterkiewicz married , from whom they divorced in 1975 . At that time she graduated in English language and literature at Somerville College of the University of Oxford and graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Arts from (BA English). Subsequent studies in Middle English at University College London , she completed in 1954 with a Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) .

Literary work

Literary debut and first experimental works

While Peterkiewicz was suffering from a near-fatal illness, Christine Brooke-Rose began writing her first novel, The Language of Love (1957), much of which was set in the reading room of the British Museum . Also, The Sycamore Tree (1958) acted again from London intellectuals , while her third novel, The Dear Deceit included (1960), the first narrative experiments. In it, a man goes on the trail of the life of his deceased father, backwards from death to birth.

During this time she also worked as a literary critic and freelance journalist for daily newspapers and magazines such as New Statesman , The Observer , The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement .

In 1962, she underwent a kidney - surgery , after her first real experimental novel Out (1964) was connected to the formally adventurous Nouveau roman La Jalousie (1957) by Alain Robbe-Grillet was compared. So they became a "nouveau novelist", although they later despised this term, however, the influence of Robbe-Grillet, whose novels into English it translated , admitted. Out was told by a white man and portrayed racial discrimination in the aftermath of a nuclear war , according to which white skin represented radiation sickness , while dark skin was considered healthy.

Your publisher refused to publish Out . The literary critic Frank Kermode wrote:

“But she was fearless, for she had now discovered the work for which she was born; every novel after that was a learned game and she took great pleasure in testing her own intelligence and the intelligence of her readers, which was now much lower. "
('But she was undismayed, for she had now discovered the work she was born to do; each book thereafter was an erudite game and she took great pleasure in it, testing her own intelligence and the intelligence of her readers, now a much reduced party').

Such (1966), for which she received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize , was about a psychologist who lost his own life during a hallucinatory episode before his death.

Experimental works and teaching

The multi-layered and eclectic author was an advocate of ommissions : in her novel Between (1968) she consistently omitted the verb “sein” (“to be”) in order to emphasize the disoriented feeling of the personal identity of the narrator and used this stylistic device a year before the publication of the novel La Disparition (1969) by Georges Perec .

Commercially, however, she was largely unknown in Britain due to her experimental style and only flourished after she separated from her second husband in 1968 and moved to France. There she became a lecturer in linguistics and English literature at the newly founded University Paris VIII in Vincennes , a stronghold of the 1968 movement . In 1975 she finally took over a professorship for English and American literature as well as literary theory and taught there until her retirement in 1988.

In addition to her teaching activities, she wrote several works on literary criticism such as A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971), A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976) and A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981).

In 1975 she inspired students on her creative writing course to collaborate on creating a narrative. The final result, Thru (1975), combined student essays with handwritten and typewritten texts, sheet music, mathematical formulas, charts, and resumes. In an interview she admitted that this self-confident deconstruction of the narrative style was written with a wink “for a few friends of narrative theory ”. Later she wrote: "It's a novel abut the textuality of text, the fictionality of fiction", "my favorite".

Emeritus and autobiographical novels

After her retirement in 1988, she settled in a small village near Avignon . Her novel Textermination (1991) is set at a conference in San Francisco attended by characters such as Jane Austen , Gustave Flaubert , TS Eliot , Thomas Pynchon , Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie , who ask for potential readers and who with the help of literary critics to be interpreted for the masses.

In her autobiographical novels Remake (1996) and Life, End of (2006), she left out the word “I” and instead referred to the narrator as “the old lady”. In her 1998 novel Next , which had 26 storytellers, each with a name beginning with a different letter of the alphabet , the verb “haben” (“to have”) was omitted to emphasize the hardships of the homeless Londoners in this book . Her second husband Jerzy Peterkiewicz - or someone similar to him - was always part of her books. In Life, End Of , the narrator divided humanity into True Friends (TFs) and Other People (OPs), with the Polish ex-husband being referred to as the OP in these memoirs.

In 2002 she published a volume of literary criticism, naming it in recognition of the French philosopher , literary critic and writer Roland Barthes Invisible Author , continuing the theme of erasure and omission.

Numerous critics praised her works, even if much was difficult to understand, but also pleasant for those who did not know the underlying theory of omission. Ellen G. Friedman placed her on a par with authors of experimental literature such as Dorothy Richardson , Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein , whose novels “explode the fixed architecture of the master narrative”. Frank Kermode stated that her originality and her abilities deserve “a greater measure of admiration and respect than we have chosen so far to accord them” .

Publications

Her literary oeuvre comprised 16 novels, five volumes of literary criticism and several collections of short stories and poems .

  • Gold , 1954
  • A grammar of metaphor , 1958
  • The sycamore tree , 1958
  • The dear deceit, a novel , 1960
  • The middle-men , 1961
  • Out , 1964
  • Such , 1966
  • Between , 1968
  • Go when you see the green man walking , 1970
  • A ZBC of Ezra Pound , 1971
  • Thru , 1975
  • A structural analysis of Pound's Usura canto , 1976
  • A Rhetoric of the Unreal , 1981
  • Amalgamemnon , 1984
  • The Christine Brooke-Rose omnibus , 1986
  • Xorandor , 1986
  • Verbivore , 1990
  • Text termination , 1991
  • Stories, theories, and things , 1991
  • Remake , 1996
  • Next , 1998
  • Subscript , 1999
  • Invisible author , 2002
  • Life, End Of , 2006

literature

  • Words on the page only - Christine Brooke-Rose . In: Schreibheft , 1990, Heft 36, pp. 95-118
  • Michela Canepari-Labib: Word worlds. Language, identity and reality in the work of Christine Brooke-Rose. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-906758-64-8 .
  • Stephanie Egger-Gajardo: The principle of inescapability. Heteronormativity in the works of Angela Carter and Christine Brooke-Rose. Dissertation University of Augsburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8260-3882-2 .
  • Kerstin Frank: The renewal of the novel under the sign of a postmodern understanding of reality. The creation and destruction of meaning in Christine Brooke-Rose's work. Dissertation Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-86821-065-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "I simply register all he sees, hears, and thinks, in a pronounless present tense. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar technique that prevented reviewers from discerning the originality ”, in: Christine Brooke-Rose: Invisible author. Last essays , Ohio State University Press, Columbus 2002, ISBN 978-0-8142-0893-9 , Chapter 1, pp. 1-19, p. 17, “The irrationality of racism is laid bare. [...] I received neither form nor content criticism but label-clichés. "
  2. ↑ Christine Brooke-Rose: Invisible author. Last essays , Ohio State University Press, Columbus 2002, ISBN 978-0-8142-0893-9 , Chapter 1, pp. 1-19, p. 17, "(see chapter 5 for a close reading of the first twenty pages) "

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brooke-Rose, Christine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Geneva
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 2012
Place of death Cabrières-d'Avignon