Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair [Hardcover]

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 thatle monde houellebecquienis 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.

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

Writing clearly, and often sharply, Sweeney deftly situates her subject in Frances ever-changing intellectual and political climate. Her study will interest literary and gender scholars, sociologists of knowledge, and historians; perhaps it should be required reading by economists and business leaders who have embraced American-style capitalism and its implicit claims to liberation. -Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature

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