Becoming a Brill Author. Publishing Ethics. Publishing Guides. General Open Access Information. For Authors. For Academic Societies. For Librarians. Research Funding. Open Access Pricing. Specialty Products. Catalogs, Flyers and Price Lists. Accessing Brill Products. Corporate Social Responsibility. Sales Contacts. Ordering from Brill. Editorial Contacts. Offices Worlwide. Course Adoption. Contact Form. The first reviews were mixed. Despite the critical disagreement, started with the very tangible feeling that Houellebecq was back.
On January 7th , I was teaching a class of French students at a Parisian marketing school. With a decade spent working in public relations in London under my belt before returning to academia to complete my PhD, I had been hired to teach a course on the Anglo-Saxon PR industry. As well as trying to impress my kaleidoscopic knowledge of Houellebecq on them, I was attempting to stress a valid, and relevant, point: Houellebecq is in many ways a marketing construct.
He has, I laboured a little, a persona in media, just like the consumer brands we were discussing as part of the course, that means brand Houellebecq is distinctive and instantly recognisable. This may have its roots in his novels, but it frequently spills out of this frame and exists independently in media.
In the scramble for information, there was much speculation. Given the dark coincidence of its publication date and the fact it has Islam at its thematic centre, Soumission will remain, no doubt, etched in the public imagination as inseparable from the Islamist massacre, and the subsequent attack on the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Vincennes. As the Charlie Hebdo cover showed, Houellebecq was already linked in the public imagination as a critic of Islam following the Lire scandal of β It is possible that his presence, his persona, functions as a signifier which suggests a critical stance towards Islam in an even more fixed way post- Charlie.
The name Houellebecq is now synonymous with terror attacks, with religious intolerance and a recognised symptom of our anxious contemporary age. This notion of authorial presence β both implied and explicit and so important for the experience of reading Houellebecq β forms the focus of this final chapter. Houellebecq himself, of course, is at least in some small way a construct, a performance since he was born Michel Thomas.
