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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Michel Houellebecq: The Era of Emptiness
Author(s)
Ruth Amar
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DOI:10.17265/2160-6579/2016.03.004
Affiliation(s)
University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
ABSTRACT
Michel
Houellebecq is perhaps the most successful, the most famous and controversial
of all current novelists writing in French. He has become a global publishing
phenomenon: His books have been translated worldwide, film adaptations of his
novels have been produced, and the author is the subject of a million-euro
publishing deals and successive media scandals in France. The novels depict
surprising forms of imaginary resources, a radiating end of the world, a
post-nuclear anxiety, and depressive characters. Houellebecq shocks us leaving
us in a world where the feelings of love, tenderness and goodwill have
disappeared. The purpose of Houellebecq’s novels is to alert about the real problems of the human society in the twenty-first
century. Indeed, in the books we can easily recognize the essential features
of contemporary society and the fact that the individual assumes a
dehumanization process in which one has to cope with his solitude in a world of
emptiness. This socio-cultural dimension is indeed the background of
Houellebecq’s novels, novels in which the protagonists seem to be wedged in a
mechanism from which it is difficult to escape: reification and dehumanization on
the one hand, “robotization” of love on the other. This article focuses on the
analysis of the texts revealing the poignant characteristics of “L’Ère du vide”
(“The Era of Emptiness”) as described by Gilles Lipovetsky: Loneliness, the
lack of love and its replacement by sexual relations.
KEYWORDS
reification, dehumanization, “robotization”, “L’Ere du vide”, loneliness, lack of love, sexual relations
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