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Sto caricando le informazioni... Textermination (1991)di Christine Brooke-Rose
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In her latest novel, Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn... all are gathered for the Annual Convention of Prayer for Being, to meet, to discuss, to pray for their continued existence in the mind of the modern reader. But what begins as a grand enterprise erupts into total pandemonium: with characters from different times, places, and genres all battling for respect and asserting their own hard-won fame and reputations. Dealing with such topical literary issues as deconstruction, multiculturalism, and the Salman Rushdie affair, this wild and humorous satire pokes fun at the academy and ultimately brings into question the value of determining a literary canon at all. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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Chapter One is already a rocky ride, as Emma (Woodhouse? Bovary?) gets into Mr Knightley's carriage, only to discover that it is actually a Landauer she's sharing in Weimar with Goethe, which soon becomes a fiacre in the streets of Paris and then a calèche belonging to an honorary canon of the cathedral at Toledo ... and after a little diversion to Spain and the Balkans somehow becomes a flight to San Francisco with a change of planes within sight of the burning city of Atlanta. Or possibly Troy. Or Moscow.
Things become a little clearer in Chapter Two, when we start to work out that these heterogeneous fictional characters from all over the world and every period of history are assembling for an MLA-style literary conference. They are there to do the things that people normally do at conferences (drink, fornicate, argue, etc.) as well as to perform their religious duty towards the Reader, in whom they live and move and have their being. And to worry about what happens when readers start to forget about them and give up on the books they appear in.
Needless to say, it doesn't all go smoothly - there seems to be a terrorist plot linked to the presence at the conference of Gibreel Farishta (from The Satanic Verses), the conference is invaded by uninvited TV and film characters protesting against their exclusion, there's a stray Chinese emperor who insists on going around in the nude, and something has gone wrong with the invitations so that both Thomas Mann's Lotte and Goethe's are there, as are the older and younger David Copperfield, as well as both Broch's and Dante's Vergil, neither of whom is quite sure where Christa Wolf's Kassandra fits into things. And there's a Viennese sinologist with a set of library steps who seems on the point of causing chaos...
If this all sounds a little bit like a Jasper fforde novel - yes, it is rather, but the references are several notches more recondite, and the logic is built to challenge your ideas about literature and how it works rather than to create a consistent fantasy-world (so in fact it doesn't need to be all that logical, and isn't). A closer parallel is probably David Lodge's conference-circuit novel, Small world, but Brooke-Rose has her fun by putting the professional literary critics ("interpreters" here) in a situation where they are no longer in charge of things.
Probably too clever for its own good, but great fun. ( )