Australian Journal of French Studies
Who’s Afraid of Michel Houellebecq? The Answer: Almost Everyone
Abstract
Michel Houellebecq’s fiction clearly possesses a polemical and prophetic dimension. And yet, since critical studies of Houellebecq’s work began in the early 2000s, a scholarly tendency has been to dilute or muddle this dimension of his fiction because of the uncomfortable questions it raises about religion, feminism, sexual liberation, immigration, and, more generally, cultural change in Europe. I point out expressions of this tendency among established Houellebecq scholars, offer explanations of what I believe motivates it, and then give a reading of