Christine Brooke-Rose

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought together to produce a comprehensive history of this ill-starred group of renegade writers. Whether the bolshie B.S. Johnson, the globetrotting Ann Quin, the cerebral Christine Brooke-Rose, or the omnipresent Anthony Burgess, these writers each brought their own unique contributions to literature at a time uniquely open to their iconoclastic message. The journey connects historical moments from Bletchley Park, to Paris May '68, to terrorist groups of the 1970s. A tale of love, loss, friendship and a shared vision, this book is a fascinating insight into a bold, provocative and influential group of writers whose collective story has gone untold, until now.

Included is the book's introduction. The book is available here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/experimentalists-9781350244405/

An introduction to Verbivoracious Press' new paperback edition of Christine Brooke-Rose's 1960 novel "The Dear Deceit". Includes some of my research previously published as a chapter in the Verbivoracious Brooke-Rose Festschrift and some new research from the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin, TX. The paperback is available direct from the press' website by following the link below;

http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/the-dear-deceit/

This book utilizes archive research, interviews and historical analysis to present a comprehensive overview of the works of Christine Brooke-Rose. A writer well-known for her idiosyncratic and experimental approaches to the novel form; this work traces her development from her early years as a social satirist, through her space-aged experimentalism in the 1960s, to her later poststructuralism and interest in digital computing and genetics. The book gives an overview of her writing and intellectual career with new archival research that places Brooke-Rose’s work in the context of the historically important events in which she was a participant: Bletchley Park codebreaking in the Second World War, the events in Paris during May 1968, the dawning of the internet and the rise of poststructuralism. Joseph Darlington begins with Brooke-Rose’s first novels written in the late 1950s of social satire, studies her experimental phase of writing and finally illuminates her unique approach to autobiography, arguing for reevaluating this interdisciplinary author and her contribution to poststructuralism, life writing and post-war literature.

This file includes the book's Introduction. The book is available here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030759056

Pynchon gives us three indefinite motifs which can take a variety of forms. The first of these, the Decoherence Event, serves as a fulcrum around which the other two flow: the Dynamo (of which the Cosmic Fascist is one version, as well as any and all power structures; it might best be understood as the vital movements of power that necessitate the hypostatized “Them” of conspiracy theorizing), and the Idyll (of which Doc’s ’60s is one instance, as well as any idealized refuge from the Dynamo and Decoherence Event both).

The article reviews mid-century debates about politics and art by Sartre and Adorno to tease out a coherent sense of the political dimension of the novel form. The novel is essentially mediated by art-autonomous concerns, but it nonetheless exists to serve an ethical or political function. Alain Robbe-Grillet is then reviewed as developing a (late) modernist, critical, political aesthetic. I then closely read several mid-60s novels linked within a capacious understanding of World Literature as the modern world-system. Out (1964) by Christine Brooke-Rose is juxtaposed with A Grain of Wheat (1967) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o to bring out key questions in the debate: the role of tradition and technique, the necessity of critical social knowledge, and the importance of the implied reader. While Adorno provides one of the most compelling accounts of modern art and the relation of aesthetics and politics, his contemporary interlocutors still have much to add to a critical understanding of the artwork, and finally Ngugi’s example remains a vital one for thinking about these issues.

Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1966 novel, Such, represents a genuine attempt to bridge the gap between the two cultures of literature and science by wedding the experimental formal innovation of the nouveau romanciers with a cosmological understanding of the universe cutting-edge at the time of composition. This paper traces the author’s conceptual journey to publication and the original techniques of approach by which she mediated and merged literary theory and empirical science. It traces the semiological function of “science” in post-war Britain as a background to the concept “experimental” literature before discussing the influence of the francophone literary movement and finally, how Brooke-Rose’s archives demonstrate the working through of continental theory and scientific practice.

Peer-reviewed research paper which appears in the Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2017.

The early 1960s saw a torrent of publications prophesying the end of the world – after the Cuban Missile Crisis many a writer penned post-apocalyptic scenarios aplenty, laying the foundation for contemporary posthumanist discourses and new conceptualisations of the ethics of alterity. The paper comments upon Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964) and Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967), two works deserving more attention than they have hitherto been given. Both authors, proper British nouvelles romancières, herald a number of forthcoming socio-cultural changes by drafting descriptions of two post-cataclysmic societies full of ‘eschatological unrest’, exploring and probing deep into their wondrous ‘inner landscapes’, for ‘the surface [alone] does not contain a key to authentic experience’ (Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future). Whereas Brooke-Rose’s Out is a narrative of societal renewal and restructuration, depicting a uchronia based on a complete reversal of the social order, Ice by Anna Kavan portrays the world via negativa – a bleak heterotopia seen only by means of paraliptic and paraleptic shifts, a place replete with half-shadows of the past selves.

Journal article for JML 44.3 (free to download)

<https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.44.3.10>



The work of the experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose is often described as constituting a joyous celebration of language that opens up the space for new structures of meaning, new subjectivities, and new futures. But in their unrelenting playfulness and their obsessive revision and restyling of language, novels such as Amalgamemnon and Textermination also betray a certain vulnerability. Hidden within their rhetoric is an awareness of a fragility that lies at the heart of language, literature, and life. What appears as a joyous excess both conceals and enacts what Derrida describes as the “radical precariousness” of literature—a literature that “survives” through the simultaneous rehearsal and denial of its own end.

The early 1960s saw a torrent of publications prophesying the end of the world – after the Cuban Missile Crisis many a writer penned post-apocalyptic scenarios aplenty, laying the foundation for contemporary posthumanist discourses and new conceptualisations of the ethics of alterity. The paper comments upon Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964) and Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967), two works deserving more attention than they have hitherto been given. Both authors, proper British nouvelles romancières, herald a number of forthcoming socio-cultural changes by drafting descriptions of two post-cataclysmic societies full of “eschatological unrest,” exploring and probing deep into their wondrous “inner landscapes,” for “the surface [alone] does not contain a key to authentic experience” (Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future). Whereas Brooke-Rose’s Out is a narrative of societal renewal and restructuration, depicting a uchronia based on a complete reversal of the social order, Ice by Anna Kavan portrays the world via negativa – a bleak heterotopia seen only by means of paraliptic and paraleptic shifts, a place replete with half-shadows of the past selves.

Contribution to a panel on Christine Brooke-Rose's legacy, part of the Brooke-Rose Society Inaugural Symposium (full details here: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/christine-brooke-rose-society-symposium).

The event took place at Sommerville College, Oxford, June 26th 2015.

The description of Christine Brooke-Rose’s texts as ‘difficult’ is a pervasive rhetorical commonplace, habitually invoked in interviews, reviews and articles. Brooke-Rose herself contributed to this discourse of difficulty surrounding her work, remaining unapologetic about the demands her writing makes on readers, but also insisting on the pleasure of the text. In this article, I trace the complex relationship between difficulty, pleasure and sales that marks Brooke-Rose’s writing career through her correspondence with publishers and her novel Textermination. Making extensive use of her archive, I investigate the ways in which difficulty is produced in the process of writing, in the text itself, and also the ways in which difficulty is negotiated in the course of publication. My paper argues that Brooke-Rose’s writing troubles any easy opposition between pleasure and difficulty. This pivots on what I call the problematic of recognition central to Brooke-Rose’s work – for the reader, in the text, and of the writer. My enquiry is framed by the question of what it means to write difficult texts as a woman writer in the late twentieth century, and the potential of viewing textual difficulty as a feminist project.

The article analyses the problematics of non-communication in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon (1984), paying special attention to intratextual realisations of absence and silence. Both read as parasemiotic signs of low indexicality and iconicity, they are nonetheless interpreted and conceptualised as a significant, meaning-laden device which merits further critical attention. Brooke-Rose’s “semiotic explorations” – so clearly visible in her growing preoccupation with language and all things linguistic – testify to her interest in the limits of social intercourse. Experimenting with what is barely verbalisable, the author creates and employs a number of original discursive practices that at the same time deepen and enhance the reader’s understanding of the characters in the novel as much as they complicate its coherent hermeneutic appraisal. Amalgamemnon is thus examined as a text unique to the British literary canon, being a ¬sui generis anti-novel mixing and matching a complex, defragmented narrative, a historiographic study of ancient myths, a prescient analysis of dehumanising technology, as well as a pressing social commentary – all conjoined in an ambitious attempt at probing the boundaries of language and thought.

In one of her earliest critical reviews, written for The London Magazine in December 1958, Christine Brooke-Rose began to stake out territory for new literary work that confounded most critical outlines. These works, which she deemed ‘necessary to the development of the novel or play’ and ‘indispensable to our knowledge of the form’, were to be contrasted with the mode traditionally associated with the novel, social realism, placed in opposition to the works of authors ‘whose main concern is to tell a story about persons recognizable as human beings in recognizable situations’. As Brooke-Rose’s literary career matured along with the dawning of the 1960s, following publication of her poetry pamphlet Gold (1954), a quartet of satirical novels (1957–1961) and her first scholarly work The Grammar of Metaphor (1958), Brooke-Rose’s connection to the nouveau roman became the single most definitive characteristic in the eyes of her British readership. This essay will consider the influence of the main protagonists of the nouveau roman upon Brooke-Rose’s short stories and novels, with particular attention paid to her novel Out (1964) and to the emphasis placed by the nouveau romanciers upon the visual and cinematic as the privileged means of apprehending reality.

Journal article for Word and Text 1:2 (2011)

This essay explores the experimental nature of Christine Brooke-Rose's narrative Thru and its attempts to break down the conventions of the genre of the novel. Reflecting on the singularity of this text that refuses to obey the laws of its genre but at the same time insists on forming part of it, the article discusses how this text should be approached and how it may be read. Through a close reading of the first few pages of Thru it links the question of genre with that of gender, and demonstrates how Brooke-Rose's text exposes and deconstructs the gender hierarchy through its play with language, narrative structures and print conventions. This play creates a multiplicity of meaning that resists any attempt to reduce the novel to one single authoritative reading. Instead, it constantly supplements the many readings it makes possible, always allowing for an 'other' meaning, another interpretation.

http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/No_2_2011.html

Lauded by literary scholar Frank Kermode in the late 1960s as the ‘sole practitioner’ of narrative on the British side of the Channel, Christine Brooke-Rose (1923 – 2012) was a writer of novels, short stories, poetry and criticism. Born in Geneva and brought up in Brussels speaking English, French and German, an aptitude for modern languages secured her a position in her twenties translating decryptions of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II.  A transformative experience, channelling ‘items…out of the air’, items as letters, words and phrases to be ‘intercepted, decrypted, translated, transmitted,’ it was this straining after potential, what she figures as a ‘groping’ after meaning, that inflects her literary and typographic practice, and was to prove integral to her beguiling literary experiments.

Founded in 2015 by Natalie Ferris and Stephanie Jones, the society aims to make the life and work of Brooke-Rose more visible and open to a new readership, as well as to bring together enthusiasts and researchers. These pages will provide information on Brooke-Rose, and updates on upcoming events and publications.

In her novel *Next*, Brooke-Rose presents the linguistic cityscapes of Estuarian English in London. Her objective is to focus on the homeless in a contemporary, multilingual urban setting, and identify their social and psychological make-up through portraying the language varieties they deploy. The aim of this paper is therefore to analyse briefly the concept of Estuary English as a particular kind of dialect and relate it to the concept of ‘speech community’, in order to see whether these notions can be applied to Brooke-Rose’s novel *Next*, which has been often described in terms of the Estuarian dialect it allegedly represents (see for example the cover jacket of the Carcanet edition). As we shall see, although these concepts certainly apply to the novel by Brooke-Rose who, strong of her position as a linguist, in her work never ceases to analyse the uses (and abuses) of language, they are also somewhat contradicted and exposed in their inadequacy. The aim of this article, then, is to locate and draw attention to the schism existing between ‘theory’ and the critique that Brooke-Rose, always suspicious of fixed and narrow definitions, accomplishes in this text.

Professor Mira Enketei, Christine Brooke-Rose’s intimate porte-parole, faces imminent termination of employment and – by extension – her promising academic career; unable to realise her potential in academia, she turns to her partner for advice and support, only to be shunned again – this time on a personal level. Bitter and dejected, the woman indulges in vivid daydreaming, “mimaging” and projecting her persona onto other people. She finally re-emerges as Cassandra, a cursed Greek prophetess, whose predictions, though always true, are never believed in by her contemporaries. Brooke-Rose introduces an interesting formal constraint, penning the whole narrative only in the future and conditional tenses, occasionally employing subjunctive and imperative moods. Her protagonist’s first-person confession, then, turns out to be a mock prophecy in which both the character and the writer comment on the whole spectrum of issues, ranging from the complexities of life to the nature of writing and work in academia.

On the cusp of the 1980s personal computers became affordable for the first time. Apple and IBM in the USA and Sinclair in the UK released computers that allowed users access to computerised word processing for the first time on a grand scale, and computers began to replace typewriters as the tool of choice for authors. The computer revolution quickly entered British schools, with Acorn BBC Microcomputers available to the majority of students from 1982. These developments had a major impact on British culture; for adults, the speed of technological change was palpable as computers that would only recently have cost the same as a house came within their financial reach. For children, computers became a staple of the everyday environment and affected the way they learned and the way they thought. The World Wide Web followed quickly on the heels of personal computers and emails could be sent by private individuals from the mid-90s. As well as changing the face of writing with the option to ‘cut and paste’, computing brought the science of chaos theory to life, feeding chaotic data into computer visualisations which captured the imagination of the public and led to the popularisation of chaos theory, as described in James Gleick’s bestselling science book, Chaos (1987). This technological progress changed the musical landscape as well, as portable synthesizers and sound systems encouraged dance music and rave culture to take off around 1990. For British literature these changes had an impact, particularly as children who had grown up with computers began to come of age. While Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was ‘no such thing as society’, British writers were influenced by an increasingly interconnected world that privileged chaos, a science of patterns and relationality, above linear, Newtonian models of cause and effect; they came to experience the world as interconnected through the World Wide Web and the internet. A faction of British writing from 1980 to 2000 distilled the new technology, and the attitudes it encouraged, into a literature of the remix. This chapter traces the influence of machine code on literary experimentation in novels such as Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon (1984) and Xorandor (1986) before showing how the ethos of the computing revolution and the illegal rave scene quickly bled into novels such as China Miéville’s début, King Rat (1998) and Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993) where the remixing of music in a rave acts as a metaphor for the remixing of lifeforms; human, animal, and vegetable. Geoff Ryman used the new technology of the internet to create 253 (1996, 1998), an online novel (later published in a print version as well) using hyperlinks to disturb the linear, cause-and-effect structure of the written word into a chaotic relationship that allowed time to be slowed down and the relationships between strangers to take centre stage. This chapter traces these reactions to new technology and finds in this confrontation the origins of the New Boom of British science fiction that was only identified on the cusp of the new millennium, but which had its roots in the new technologies that offered writers new ways to remix old genres.

Christine Brooke-Rose published two ostensibly autobiographical works; the quasi-fictionalised “antibiography” Remake and Life: End of which takes a philosophical rather than narrative form. Utilising correspondence and other personal documents, this paper concerns the notable life events which Brooke-Rose left unaddressed in her writing (war work, illness, marriage breakdown, poststructuralist feuding), the reasons for these excisions and what such a process reveals about the act of transcribing life. It is argued that Brooke-Rose’s approach to autobiography reflects in microcosm her deep concern for writing as both individual trace and transhuman memory; a sublime form made ridiculous by its everyday limitations.

This paper considers the ways in which Christine Brooke-Rose worked with and against the avant-garde to become the ‘echo-chamber for allusions’ that she so often advocated.  Offering a close-reading of the little known Brooke-Rose poem, 'Today the Acupuncturist', written at a key moment in her working life – 1963, the paper considers ideas thrown up and back by this poem towards her conception of an ‘avant-garde’ practice.

The Sixties saw a huge rise in the adjective “experimental” being used to describe avant garde writing. For the novelist Christine Brooke-Rose this term, deriving from the lexicon of the hard sciences, was entirely appropriate. Captivated by a utopian notion of an emergent “space age”, she aimed to create a new type of novel to break out of mechanistic nineteenth century tradition and inspire a “communication revolution” to match the “non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean” revolution in science. The result was Such (1966), a novel set during a three-minute heart massage as a psychiatrist who specialises in treating astrophysicists flits between memory and dream. The inner-space of consciousness is metaphorically transformed to reflect quantum theoretical and astrophysical understanding contemporary to the novel’s construction.
Access to the Brooke-Rose archive at the Harry Ransom Centre, Texas, has provided unique insights into the process of research behind the novel. Brooke-Rose’s journals contain notes from numerous lectures on quantum theory, astronomy and the science behind the space race. In her essays of the period, Brooke-Rose demanded an equal level of commitment to scientific understanding from her fellow novelists. At one point she even suggested that, should everyday language not change to reflect the post-Einstein world of relativity, “we would not be equipped to survive the evolutionary process”. To prevent this, Such suggests we treat our minds like a map of the universe. Brooke-Rose later went on to regret this moon-eyed, space aged thinking, yet the novel remains a fascinating example of Sixties positivism.

"""The experimental novelist, theorist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose is mostly associated with her postmodernist work, when she appears in academic criticism at all. Her threefold approach of lecturing, novel-writing and publishing works of theory in the 1980s represents her fullest actualisation of this postmodern project. However, this was not the first time Brooke-Rose had attempted this style of work. A theoretical work was commissioned to accompany her 1960s experimental novels but, upon encountering French poststructuralism, she called off the project as “Britain was decades behind”. She was left feeling hopelessly uninformed. To rectify this problem, Brooke-Rose took up a teaching post at the University of Paris VII in March 1968. In search of revolutionary ideas, she had found herself in the centre of the largest student uprising in modern European history.

Until now, knowledge of Brooke-Rose’s experiences during May ’68 has been limited to a couple of dismissive pages published in her 1996 “anti-biography” novel Remake. However, with access to the Harry Ransom Centre’s considerable Brooke-Rose archive in September of this year, a far more detailed and nuanced interrogation of her experiences is set to emerge. The enthusiasm, commitment and eventual disillusion and cynicism involved in witnessing a revolutionary moment from beginning to end is traced through her journalism, theoretical essays and her most experimental novel, 1975’s Thru. In many ways the moment can be read as the point at which her forward-looking “experimental” writing transforms into ironic and distanced “postmodern” writing. In this sense, Brooke-Rose is sharing the experiences of the whole ’68 generation – their revolutionary ideals betrayed and their profitable ideas recuperated into late capitalism."""