Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

Widely acknowledged as an important, if highly controversial, figure in contemporary literature, French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq has elicited diverse critical responses.

In this book Carole Sweeney examines his novels as a response to the advance of neoliberalism into all areas of affective human life. This historicizing study argues that le monde houellebecquien is an 'atomised society' of banal quotidian alienation populated by quietly resentful men who are the botched subjects of late-capitalism. Addressing Houellebecq's handling of the 'failure' of the radical thought of '68, Sweeney looks at the ways in which his fiction treats feminism, the decline of religion and the family, as well as
the obsolescence of French 'theory' and the Sartrean notion of 'engaged' literature.

Reading the world with the disappointed idealism of a contemporary moralist, Houellebecq's novels, Sweeney argues, fluctuate between despair for the world as it is and a limp utopian hope for a post-humanity.

Autorentext

Carole Sweeney is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

CAROLE SWEENEY is a Lecturer in French and Transnational Studies at the University of Southampton. She has written on race, colonialism, and interwar European modernism. She is currently working on a comparative literary project looking at the Francophone Americas and international avant-gardism.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Reception/Notes on Two Scandals
2. The 'Sixties gone toxic'
3. The Third Spirit of Capitalism?
4. Botched Subjects
5. The End of Sex
   Conclusion
   Bibliography
   Index