Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission : Adventures in Space, Time, Possibilities and French Studies
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Redefining French Studies has proven a fertile (and necessary) exercise over the last few decades, as scholars have sought to position, and reposition, theoretical enquiry, pedagogy and the fields of literary, cultural and social critique associated with the term, within debates about globalisation, the transnational and the interdisciplinary. 1 More generally, concepts associated with national identities have been revisited 2 in the light of contemporary reconfigurations and deterritorialisations of the postcolonial, revealing the extent to which literature in particular engages cosmopolitics (and cosmopoetics) that entail a critical, rather than an instrumental, nationalism as an important pole in how cultural belonging is produced and disseminated, experienced and located.Within these dynamics, considerations of a contemporary novel that situates the national, specifically France, as its focus, requires readings that bring to bear the country's inherent (self-)difference, otherness, trans-ience, all the more so given that the novel in question, Michel Houellebecq's Soumission, 3 due to the nature of its plot and its relevance to current events, became implicated in national searches for meaning that ensued.To say 2015 was a difficult year for Paris, and for France, would be an understatement.The nation, and indeed the world, is still trying to understand the terrorist atrocities experienced in January and November 2015, and the questions they raise are far-reaching, for the country, its citizens and its values.These include questions about why and how the events took place, about what responses are appropriate, but also more fundamental interrogations about the nation's engagement with issues such as multiculturalism, integration, communities, the social sphere, gender, poverty and religion.In a social-media-dominated, immediacy-articulated, contemporary experience-scape, we also interrogate our own participation, our affective responses, our curation of a collective mourning, 1 See, for example,
DOI: 10.3828/ajfs.2017.03
Author: Murray Pratt
Institutions: Amsterdam University College, University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2607450631