Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract In Chapter I I discussed Brooke-Rose’s increasing frustration in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the linear, causal logic of traditional narrative and with the ontological presuppositions of realist character-portrayal. At the same time an intellectual climate was developing in France that was characterized by what Brooke-Rose calls ‘interdisciplinary all-inclusiveness’, in which ‘writers are influenced by and passionately interested in contemporary philosophers and scientists’ (1968c: 20). Beginning with her experimental fiction of the 1960s, she sought to bring to British fiction this same inter-animation of discourses by radically altering the discourse of the novel.