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

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.

Introduction

This introduction lays out the case for approaching special effects from a transmedia standpoint, focusing on the unexpected roles they play in building and maintaining the storyworlds of fantastic media franchises and redefining traditional notions of media authorship, performance, and genre. Relevant scholarship on spectacle, film technology and narrative, and transmedia storytelling is reviewed, with an emphasis on the gap between studies of special effects and convergence culture, which this book seeks to fill. An extended discussion of preproduction practices in early cinema and Classical Hollywood provides an alternative framework for understanding special effects as designed imagery. Previews of the book’s chapters conclude the introduction.

Comics and Authorship: An Introduction

If media authorship can be understood "as a site of cultural tension" (Johnson and Gray 2013, 10), then a deeper understanding of comics authorship will also provide clues regarding the sustaining—and constraining— of creative practices in other media ecologies and intermedial interactions (such as, for instance, adaptations). For comics, this implies combining insights from comics scholars, practitioners as well as agents involved in the publication and dissemination of comics. This issue, building on the findings of extant scholarship on authorship in comics and other media, hopes to provide incentive for further adventures into the (almost) unknown of comics authorship.