The Limits of Looking: Conceptualising the Frame in Brooke-Rose’s Out and Quin’s Berg

Chapter One investigates frame motifs in Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964) and Quin’s Berg (1964), alongside the wider reconceptualization of the frame in 1960s visual artwork. The frame comes to be thought of as less masterful a structure of containment, isolation and presentation than in its traditional incarnations. This chapter entails re-thinking the frame as a strategy, or series of strategies, of intellectual, disciplinary and social containment. Using visual works by Phillip King and Eva Hesse, and drawing on theorizations of the frame from Jacques Derrida ( The Truth in Painting , 1978) to Judith Butler ( Frames of War , 2016) – as well as conceptions of the frame’s function as early as 1435, with Leon Battista Alberti’s systematisation of single-point perspective for painters – the chapter closely reads frame imagery in the novels as a means of interrogating the ways they look at looking, at representation, and how the use of frames in these novels leads to a means of theoretically bridging the gap between aesthetic and social realms (the frame having a function in each). The novels attempt to address the politics of positioning – especially Brooke-Rose’s Out with its reversal of Western racial hierarchy, though it cannot totally subvert the whiteness of its own gaze.