Download or read book Pathos Poetry and Politics in Michel Houellebecq s Fiction written by Russell Williams and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Pathos, Poetry and Politics in Michel Houellebecq's fiction, Russell Williams examines the literary style of France's most notorious novelist. Houellebecq is frequently the focus of debate for his provocative comments about Islam and the decline of Western civilisation. This book refocuses attention on how such provocation is an integral part of the texture of his novels. Williams considers Houellebecq's writing about literature and outlines the key principles of the author's poetics, founded on an acute sensitivity to reading experience. He then explores Houellebecq's earliest poetry before mapping this poetic voice into his subsequent fiction, including Sérotonine (2019). Houellebecq's relationship with genre fiction and the crucial issue of the authorial persona that exists in and around his texts are also explored"--

Download or read book Unreconciled written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected poems from the critically acclaimed author of Submission and The Elementary Particles A shimmering selection of poems chosen from four collections of one of France’s most exciting authors, Unreconciled shines a fresh light on Michel Houellebecq and reveals the radical singularity of his work. Drawing on themes that are similar to the ones in his novels, these poems are a journey into the depths of individual experience and universal passions. Divided into five parts, Unreconciled forms a narrative of love, hopelessness, catastrophe, dedication, and—ultimately—redemption. In a world of supermarkets and public transportation, indifferent landscapes and lonely nights, Houellebecq manages to find traces of divine grace even as he exposes our inexorable decline into chaos. Told through forms and rhythms that are both ancient and new, with language steeped in the everyday, Unreconciled stands in the tradition of Baudelaire while making a bold new claim on contemporary verse. It reveals that in addition to his work as an incisive novelist, Houellebecq is one of our most perceptive poets with a vision of our era that brims with tensions that cannot—and will not—be reconciled.

Download or read book Public Enemies written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008 Houellebecq and Levy, two of France's most celebrated intellectuals, began a ferocious exchange of letters, resulting in this book. In their inimitably witty, fascinating, and confrontational correspondence they lock horns on everything, including literature, sex, politics, family, fame, and even themselves."

Download or read book Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Degenerative Realism written by Christy Wampole and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

Download or read book The Preservationist written by Justin Kramon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Sam Blount, meeting Julia is the best thing that has ever happened to him. Working at the local college and unsuccessful in his previous relationships, he’d been feeling troubled about his approaching fortieth birthday, “a great beast of a birthday,” as he sees it, but being with Julia makes him feel young and hopeful. Julia Stilwell, a freshman trying to come to terms with a recent tragedy that has stripped her of her greatest talent, is flattered by Sam’s attention. But their relationship is tested by a shy young man with a secret, Marcus Broley, who is also infatuated with Julia. Told in alternating points of view, The Preservationist is the riveting tale of Julia and Sam's relationship, which begins to unravel as the threat of violence approaches and Julia becomes less and less sure whom she can trust.

Download or read book Interventions 2020 written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Polity. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of God in the West was the prelude to a formidable metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity’s masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom doomed to follow advertising’s every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this skin-deep, superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread. However, we can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our iPhones, stop buying stuff, stop wanting to buy stuff, temporarily detach ourselves and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds. This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.

Download or read book Ethos and Narrative Interpretation written by Liesbeth Korthals Altes and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation examines the fruitfulness of the concept of ethos for the theory and analysis of literary narrative. The notion of ethos refers to the broadly persuasive effects of the image one may have of a speaker’s psychology, world view, and emotional or ethical stance. How and why do readers attribute an ethos (of, for example, sincerity, reliability, authority, or irony) to literary characters, narrators, and even to authors? Are there particular conditions under which it is more appropriate for interpreters to attribute an ethos to authors, rather than to narrators? In the answer Liesbeth Korthals Altes proposes to such questions, ethos attributions are deeply implicated in the process of interpreting and evaluating narrative texts. Demonstrating the extent to which ethos attributions, and hence, interpretive acts, play a tacit role in many methods of narratological analysis, Korthals Altes also questions the agenda and epistemological status of various narratologies, both classical and post-classical. Her approach, rooted in a broad understanding of the role and circulation of narrative art in culture, rehabilitates interpretation, both as a tool and as an object of investigation in narrative studies.

Download or read book Whatever written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Serpent's Tail Classics. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Houellebecq captures precisely the cynical disillusionment of disaffected youth."?Booklist "This boy needs serious therapy. He may be beyond help."?The Washington Post Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life. Michel Houellebecq is a multi-award-winning French author. He currently lives in Spain.

Download or read book Hot Milk written by Deborah Levy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Hot Milk moves "gracefully among pathos, danger, and humor” (The New York Times). I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant--their very last chance--in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Sofia's mother's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective--tracking her mother's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain--deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community. Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.

Download or read book H P Lovecraft written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning French novelist pays tribute to a literary hero in this critical biography of the master of horror—with a foreword by Stephen King. Best known for his acclaimed novels, such as the Prix Goncourt-winning The Map and the Territory, Michael Houellebecq devotes his single work of nonfiction to the pioneering author of horror and weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. In a volume that is part biographical sketch and part pronouncement on existence and literature, France's most famous contemporary author praises his prewar American alter ego, whose style couldn't be less like his own. With a foreword by Lovecraft admirer Stephen King, this eloquently translated edition is an insightful introduction to both Lovecraft’s dark mythology and Houellebecq’s deadpan prose.

Download or read book Contemporary Fiction in French written by Anna-Louise Milne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our global literary field is fluid and exists in a state of constant evolution. Contemporary fiction in French has become a polycentric and transnational field of vibrant and varied experimentation; the collapse of the distinction between 'French' and 'Francophone' literature has opened up French writing to a world of new influences and interactions. In this collection, renowned scholars provide thoughtful close readings of a whole range of genres, from graphic novels to crime fiction to the influence of television and film, to analyse modern French fiction in its historical and sociological context. Allowing students of contemporary French literature and culture to situate specific works within broader trends, the volume provides an engaging, global and timely overview of contemporary fiction writing in French, and demonstrates how our modern literary world is more complex and diverse than ever before.

Download or read book Literature and Sustainability written by Adeline Johns-Putra and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might literary scholarship engage with the sustainability debate? Aimed at research scholars and advanced students in literary and environmental studies, this collection brings together twelve essays by leading and up-coming scholars on the theme of literature and sustainability. In today's sociopolitical world, sustainability has become a ubiquitous term, yet one potentially driven to near meaninglessness by the extent of its usage. While much has been written on sustainability in various domains, this volume sets out to foreground the contributions literary scholarship might make to notions of sustainability, both as an idea with a particular history and as an attempt to reconceptualise the way we live. Essays in this volume take a range of approaches, using the tools of literary analysis to interrogate sustainability's various paradoxes and to examine how literature in its various forms might envisage notions of sustainability.

Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Satire written by Jonathan Greenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.

Download or read book The Illiterate written by Ágota Kristóf and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, late in her legendary career, Ágota Kristóf wrote this slim dagger of a memoir about being a refugee after fleeing Hungary in 1956 Narrated in a series of stark, brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Ágota Kristóf’s memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. Few writers can convey so much in so little space. Fierce yet almost pointedly flat and documentarian in tone, Kristóf portrays with a disturbing level of detail and directness an implacable message of loss: first, she is forced to learn Russian as a child (with the Soviet takeover of Hungary, Russian became obligatory at school); next, at age twenty-one, she finds herself required to learn French to survive: I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don’t know it. I don’t speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries, which I frequently consult. It is for this reason that I also call the French language an enemy language. There is a further reason, the most serious of all: this language is killing my mother tongue.

Download or read book Michel Houellebecq written by Douglas Morrey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Houellebecq is one of the most successful and controversial contemporary French novelists. Translated worldwide, with three film adaptations of his works, he has also been at the center of a host of media scandals in France. In this book, Douglas Morrey examines Houellebecq's stark representation of humanity—a terminal state of decadence and decline ripe for replacement by a posthuman successor—looking at the global significance of his visions at the same time that he situates them in the contexts of French literature, culture, and society.

Download or read book Architecture and Modern Literature written by David Anton Spurr and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.