Houellebecq's Women as Melancholic Subjects

Abstract

I am a real newcomer to the work of Ross Chambers. Indeed, when he died, I had not yet discovered his works. At that time, I was in the final phase of writing up my doctoral thesis, and the outpouring of grief and remembrances from the French studies community in Australia (and beyond) was enough to make me take off my dissertation blinkers and focus some of my fast-dwindling time on this man who had inspired so many. I read Alistair Rolls's tribute to Chambers; he wrote about his first time meeting Ross and hearing him present, feeling like an undergraduate attending a masterclass in literary analysis. That comment stayed with me (and, having checked Rolls's piece, I do indeed remember the line word for word, but for a single one). A foray into Chambers's works themselves was mostly intimidating. If Rolls had felt like an undergraduate, then I was back in secondary school. I turned back to my thesis (and, happily, completed it). Over a year later, due in equal parts to the prompting of Valentina and a presentation drawing on Chambers’s work given by the very same Alistair Rolls, I returned for a second look. Yes: Chambers proved just as intimidating as before, but also exciting - and inspiring. Much of his work focused on nineteenth-century texts - an area in which I have no experience whatsoever. Chambers’s ideas, however, are far more adaptable than I. If I can show one thing in this essay, I hope it it that Chambers's virtuosity has not only touched a generation of academics, but continues, and will continue, to push new generations of aspiring literary scholars to be critical, different and, dare I say it, bold in their work.