Under Suspicion: Christine Brooke-Rose, Intelligence Work, and the Theory Wars

Abstract

This article looks at Christine Brooke-Rose's late work of life-writing, Remake (1996) and its depiction of Brooke-Rose's wartime experience working in the Allied code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. I situate Remake's recall of Bletchley Park within a textual matrix that includes Brooke-Rose's own academic writing of the 1980s–90s, as well as texts that emerged out of the so-called ‘Theory Wars’ of the same period – especially relating to the revelation of Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism. In this range of writing, I trace a set of common concerns regarding personal history, suspicion, secrecy, disclosure, and mastery that herald a turn towards other forms of knowing. In doing so, I locate Remake at a crucial juncture in the emergence of our present post-critical moment.