On the return of the (media) author: Michel Houellebecq, écrivain médiatique

Abstract

This article argues that Michel Houellebecq is an écrivain médiatique, and it examines how and why he engages in an authorial strategy that relies on more than the text and presents the author as a visible, multimedia, and culturally relevant figure. From an epistemological need to reassess authorship in the digital age, this article defines media authorship before analysing Houellebecq through a critical framework including Meizoz’s concept of posturing (2007), Saint-Gelais’s transmediality (2011) and Angenot’s social discourse (1989). It addresses how Houellebecq attempts to situate and justify his media-focused and author-centric strategy, showing how this reflects the challenges of the cultural domination of mass media and new technologies of the digital age, and indicates that the autonomy of the literary field is diminishing. This article shows how a superficially transgressive engagement with the media and multimedia in fact reflects consent to the dynamics of the contemporary socio-cultural context.