Christine Brooke-Rose Biography

British novelist and critic, born in Brussels; she grew up in Switzerland and later attended Somerville College, Oxford. In 1975 she became a professor of American literature at the University of Paris VII. Though her fiction began to appear in the late 1950s, Brooke-Rose's early novels were much influenced by Murdoch. An illness in the 1960s and her readings in the nouveau roman radically changed her style. Out (1964), Such (1966), Between (1968), and Thru (1975), published in one volume as The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus (1986), display a gamut of post-modernist influences, ranging from the detached objectivity of Robbe-Grillet in the early work to the linguistic play associated with post-structuralism in the later novels. In her more recent novels Amalgammemnon (1984), Xorandor (1986), and Verbivore (1989), Brooke-Rose puts into fictional practice the theories of deconstruction associated with Derrida, while revealing an obsessive concern with modern technology. Textermination (1991), a characteristically playful construction of puns and literary references, was followed by the autobiographical Remake (1996), which uses material from the seventy years of its author's life to compose an experimental third-person novel. She has also published the essays Stories, Theories and Things (1991), which examine the nature and determination of the canon.