SOURCE: Seed, David. Review of Stories, Theories, and Things and Textermination, by Christine Brooke-Rose. Review of Contemporary Fiction 12, no. 1 (spring 1992): 142-44.

In the following review, Seed evaluates Brooke-Rose's overriding concern with the intersection of literature and contemporary literary theory in Stories, Theories, and Things and Textermination.

Christine Brooke-Rose's latest collection of essays [Stories, Theories, and Things] covers a very broad range of topics mostly connected through the notion of story. Unlike her earlier study A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) this volume carries a deliberately miscellaneous-sounding title which in effect gives the author priority over any single theoretical topic. This is important because it relates to one of Brooke-Rose's most engaging characteristics as a critic. Although she has taught for twenty years in the very citadel of Gallic theory, Paris VIII, she has avoided many of the pitfalls of continental theorists such as dogmatic generalization and a tendency toward...