'Doing a Houellebecq' in the Age of Screens: Trolling, Selfies and Textual Bricolage.

Contrasting with readings of his work that strive to shackle the author to the traditional French nineteenth-century literary canon, this article argues that Michel Houellebecq can be understood as a novelist of the Facebook generation. To put it another way, this article considers what happens when a novelist who began his literary career stressing the insufficiency of literature (in Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994) keeps on writing. Not only does he persist, but he does so against the background of an ever-accelerating evolution in the technologies, channels and modes of reading towards a post-literate age. This article thus considers the cultural logics of the digital moment—including re/appropriation, information overload, online trolling and the curation of online identities—and how they illuminate the themes, texture and politics of Houellebecq's work. This argument is illustrated through examples drawn from Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and also briefly considers how the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm might prove a helpful frame through which to view the work of the French novelist. Sérotonine, I argue, is far from the novelist's most accomplished novel, but demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the forms and structures of contemporary online experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]