Generational Language-Games and Technological Mediation in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Intercom Quartet
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article reconsiders intergenerational communication in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon (1984), Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991) through discourse-linguistic close reading. It distinguishes three related but non-identical configurations: chronological intergenerational contact, media-generational difference, and textual genealogy between inherited literature and later readers. The analysis combines communication accommodation theory, Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games, affordance theory, and a technically delimited use of Shannon’s information theory. It examines modality, register, wordplay, code, intertextuality, channel constraints, and sequences of communicative repair. The findings show that Xorandor provides the quartet’s clearest encounter between age groups, whereas the other novels displace the problem into institutional obsolescence, infrastructural dependency, and literary transmission. Brooke-Rose does not represent generations as absolutely incommensurable. Instead, communication is asymmetrically and partially translatable: it succeeds when speakers recognize different competencies and construct an interface between them. Technology is therefore neither a neutral channel nor a simple cause of decline; it distributes visibility, agency, and interpretive authority. The quartet ultimately models generational difference as a problem of mediation rather than biological destiny.
Author: Emiliya Natig Aliyeva
Institution: Azerbaijan University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7204482164