Stories, Theories and Things [Paperback]

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose investigates those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real' in fiction.Personal reflections on the author's fictional craft progress to well-developed analyses of other writers, from Hawthorne and Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate the difficult border zones between the invented and the real. Personal reflections on the author's fictional craft progress to well-developed analyses of other writers, from Hawthorne and Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate the difficult border zones between the invented and the real. 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 Université 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.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 ChlC=