Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake: Constraints as Modes of Loosening the Author

Abstract

The author analyses Christine Brooke-Rose’s autobiographical novel "Remake" in light of three notions devised by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant: ‘loosening,’ ‘inconvenience,’ and ‘infrastructure.’ Brooke-Rose was a multilingual writer of fiction and non-fiction, a translator, literary critic, and academic teacher. She created peculiar lipograms as well as other kinds of constraints in her novels long before they became markers of the French group OuLiPo. The author of the article argues that the experimental, autofictional narratives she developed towards the end of her life – among them Remake – stemmed from her experiences of cultural and geographical exile, and as such may be interpreted through the lens of affect theory.

Keywords

• Christine Brooke-Rose
• Remake
• Lauren Berlant
• inconvenience
• infrastructure