Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose

by Ellen G. Friedman, Richard Martin

The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities.
As these themes suggest, Brooke-Rose is sometime perceived as a "difficult" writer, especially given the dazzling virtuosity of the linguistic wordplay that enlivens her later novels. Utterly Other Discourse (a phrase from her 1984 novel Amalgamemnon) provides a valuable introduction to her work; in fifteen essays—some previously published, some written for this book—scholars from America, England, and Europe examine her work from a variety of critical angles. Also included is the opening chapter from Brooke-Rose's autobiographical novel, Remake, offering a rare look at the woman behind the texts.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1995

Reviews

[Scribble Orca]

Not nearly as indispensable as Christine Brooke-Rose' own commentary Invisible Author: Last Essays and Stories, Theories and Things on her work or theoretical concerns, but well worth reading for the various (sometimes far-stretched) perspectives and analyses on her Prepositional Four and Intercomm Quartet (nothing beyond Textermination; see the excellent close reading from McHale). A few essays strain to paint her more feminist than humanist, a label she herself denied, and only one is as utterly unreadababble as the most die-hard academic could wish. The commentary on Xorandor is utterly hilarious, and an analysis of Between conflates the life of the author with the life of the protagonist, although the essays are in general utterly desperate to separate text from texteur.

Sadly, little attention, apart from Richard Martin's brief summary, is given to her first published poem Gold: A Poem and her earliest novels The Languages of Love, The Sycamore Tree, The Dear Deceit, and The Middlemen: A Satire, which reveal the themes preoccupying her later, and already containing the seeds of where her games with grammar and language would lead her, or her critical works on Pound A Zbc Of Ezra Pound and A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse, and her A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic or A Grammar of Metaphor.

A valuable addition even for those with unscholarly aims.

[David]

Already somewhat dated by being more or less utterly unaware of the last quarter of Brooke-Rose's output, this collection of essays does try to engage the author more or less on her own terms--or, at least, on terms the author might have accepted as valid. Friedman's own essay, along with Brian McHale's (the final essays in the collection) seem to me most helpful in wrestling with the enigma that is Brooke-Rose's theofaery-in(per)spyered f(r)iction.