Stories, Theories and Things

ISBN-13: 9780521391818 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 320 str.

Christine Brooke-Rose

Opis

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 and 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 recognized writer of fiction and theory, and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other modern movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays. Christine Brooke-Rose, formerly a professor at the Universite de Paris, and now retired, lives in France. She is the author of several works of literary criticism and a number of novels, including Amalgamemnon and Xorander.

Recenzje

"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

Spis treści

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.