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"To Stand a Chance": Quantum Uncertainty and Religious Conversion in Michel Houellebecq's Submission
Malmö högskola, Faculty of Culture and Society (KS), School of Arts and Communication (K3).
2017 (English)In: Concentric : Literary and Cultural Studies, ISSN 1729-6897, Vol. 43, no 2, p. 297-324Article in journal (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Michel Houellebecq's novel, Submission (2015), is structured around the speculative premise that in the year 2022 the Muslim Brotherhood could become the dominant political party in France, leading to a society-wide shift in values and practices. This paper explores how Houellebecq uses religious conversion in the novel as a literary metaphor for quantum uncertainty. By lacing the patchwork plot with ambiguity and satire, Houellebecq tries to reconcile the random and predetermined elements of human actions, given the physical reality of our atom-based world and existence. Against the background of his selfish male and female characters, Houellebecq plays with the possibility of transcending the pitifulness of the contemporary human condition, which both he and his characters ultimately achieve not through religion but through fiction. Interpreting Submission in the context of theories about the unpredictable, computational nature of the universe raises interesting questions about the programmability of human behavior and the use of speculative fiction as a tool for generating alternative futures.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan , 2017. Vol. 43, no 2, p. 297-324
Keywords [en]
speculative fiction, conversion, quantum uncertainty, computation, mutation, generative, Michel Houellebecq
National Category
Humanities and the Arts
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-1678DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2017.43.2.13ISI: 000417475000013Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85030789357Local ID: 25553OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-1678DiVA, id: diva2:1398409
Available from: 2020-02-27 Created: 2020-02-27 Last updated: 2024-02-06Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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  • de-DE
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  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
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Output format
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  • asciidoc
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