Event
Michel Houellebecq as Filmic Object
Two recent films -- Near Death Experience (2014) and The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (2014) -- have featured the controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq as protagonist. What can Houellebecq's earlier fictional, poetic and essayistic writings tell us about his relation to the image, moving and still? What does this recent filmic turn represent in terms of his relentless self-fashioning? Why film? Why now?
Christy Wampole is Assistant Professor of French at Princeton University. Her books include Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a collection of essays on American culture titled The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation (HarperCollins, 2015). She has published various essays and scholarly articles in The New York Times, The New Yorker, MLN, Modern Language Review, Compar(a)ison, and L'Esprit Créateur.