Stories, Theories and Things

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose investigates those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real' in fiction.

Christine Brooke-Rose (Author)

9780521102728, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 March 2009

320 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.41 kg

"What makes this an especially interesting miscellany is that it is about 'both literary theory and creativity,' offering the insights of a writer who is both a novelist and a critic....on the whole this work reveals the intelligence, erudition, and creativity of a remarkable novelist and critic." Alice Kaminsky, International Studies in Philosophy

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne to Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real'. The result is an extended meditation in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose's criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognised writer of fiction and theory and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other other movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I. Theories as stories: 1. Stories, theories and things
2. Whatever happened to narratology?
3. Is is, is id?
Part II. Stories and style: 4. A for but: Hawthorne's 'The Custom-House'
5. Ill locutions
6. Ill logics of irony
7. Ill wit and sick tragedy
8. Cheng Ming Chi'I'd
9. Notes on the metre of Auden's The Age of Anxiety
Part III. Theories of stories: 10. Fiction, figment, feign
11. Which way did they go? Thataways
12. Palimpsest history
13. Illusions of parody
14. Illusions of anti-realism
15. A womb of one's own?
Part IV. Things?: 16. Woman as semiotic object
17. Illiterations
18. Ill wit and good humour
19. An allegory of aesthetics
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]