SOURCE: Lawrence, Karen R. “Dialogizing Theory in Brooke-Rose's Thru.” Western Humanities Review 50-51 (winter-spring 1997): 352-58.

In the following essay, Lawrence discusses the intersection of fiction and literary theory in Thru.

The work of Christine Brooke-Rose, both novelist and narrative theorist, provides one of the most interesting cases of the imbrication of theory and fiction in contemporary writing. Her novels are radical experiments in which theories inform fiction and yet fiction intervenes to dramatize theory's limitations. Thru (1975), her most self-consciously theoretical novel, written during the heyday of the “theory boom” in French universities (and a time when she herself taught at the experimental university at Vincennes), both thematizes and historicizes theory debates. In it, theory is dialogized, that is, theories are made to speak to one another, revealing their blindnesses and emotional investments like characters in a more conventional novel. In Thru, Brooke-Rose tests the limits of theory by...