Christine Brooke-Rose : motes, beams and the horse's mouth

White, G

Abstract

The founding of the Christine Brooke-Rose Society and its inaugural event prompted me to revisit my history with the author with whom I was fortunate enough to correspond during the last decade of her life. Our correspondence ran alongside my completing a PhD, gaining full-time employment as an academic, getting married, becoming a father and publishing a monograph and a number of articles, including over twenty-five thousand words of criticism on Brooke-Rose’s work. During the same time Brooke-Rose was working on her late novels and her last book of criticism, contending with accumulating illness and disability and the approach of the ultimate, end of. Our contact focused on Thru, the novel that sets itself at the intersection of the critical and the creative in an academic environment and a text she herself was already retrospectively revisiting at this time in the article that became chapter five of Invisible Author: Last Essays.1 This essay draws on that correspondence to consider Brooke-Rose’s relationship to academic criticism as a critic and novelist, the ways in which those overlapping identities affected each other and, with reference to Thru, to suggest how her work in both fields offers significant insights and opportunities relevant to both contemporary critical thought and literary practice.

Citation

White, G. (2018). Christine Brooke-Rose : motes, beams and the horse's mouth. Textual Practice, 32(2), 317-336. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1413049

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 9, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Jan 29, 2018
• Publication Date: Jan 29, 2018
• Deposit Date: Oct 9, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 29, 2019
• Journal: Textual Practice
• Print ISSN: 0950-236X
• Publisher: Routledge
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 317-336
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1413049
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1413049
• Related Public URLs: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/current