Paper short abstract

This paper reads Houellebecq’s novels through Foucault’s heterotopia. The Elementary Particles, Extension of the Domain of Struggle, and The Map and the Territory depict liminal spaces (offices, galleries) that expose alienation, emptiness, and the impossibility of utopia in contemporary society.

Paper long abstract

Michel Houellebecq’s work can be read as a critical map of the liminal spaces and subjects of late modernity. Impersonal hotels, suburban zones, offices, laboratories, and even the art world are not mere backdrops but instead condense tensions between desire and emptiness, belonging and anonymity, consumption and transcendence. This paper proposes to read these spaces through Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, understood as an “other space” that reflects, inverts, or subverts the social order. The intersection of heterotopias and liminal poetics in Houellebecq sheds light on how his literature is structured around thresholds of experience: bodies in transit, suspended identities, and impossible communities. In "The Elementary Particles", spiritual retreats and scientific laboratories emerge as heterotopias where utopias of sexuality and posthuman life are simultaneously projected and undermined. "Extension of the Domain of Struggle" presents offices, suburban landscapes, and anonymous hotels as heterotopias of alienation, where subjectivity is dissolved into routines of work and solitude. Finally, in "The Map and the Territory", the spaces of art galleries and exhibitions function as heterotopias of representation, exposing the commodification of culture and the fragility of identity within contemporary capitalism. In this sense, Houellebecq does not merely describe spaces but constructs a critical geography of modernity, where heterotopic experience translates into a poetics of emptiness, alienation, and transit. This paper therefore argues that his narrative can be read as a literary atlas of contemporary heterotopias, making visible the impossibility of utopia within neoliberal society.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Atwood’s The Year of the Flood links nature, technology, and religion. Through the hymns and sermons of the God’s Gardeners, the novel reveals how ecological narratives can both resist and mirror technocratic control, shaping our collective visions of nature amid crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) weaves together nature, technology, and religion through narrative form. Atwood’s concept of “ustopia” captures the novel’s blurred line between utopia and dystopia: a corporate technocracy devoted to genetic engineering coexists with the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious sect preparing for an apocalyptic “Waterless Flood.” Through sermons and hymns drawn from the God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, Atwood constructs a symbolic world in which vegetal metaphors and ritual language seek to reimagine humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

While the Gardeners seem to embody ecological resistance, they mirror the technocracy in their desire to transcend the “flaws” of human design and to impose unity on a reified vision of nature. Their hymns and sermons celebrate harmony and belonging, yet they also suppress dissent and critical reflection. Drawing on Lluís Duch’s sociophenomenological approach to religion and Mark C. Taylor’s definition of religion as an adaptive network of myths and rituals, I argue that Atwood exposes how spiritual narratives can function both as poetic creation and as tools of control.

By interlacing sacred song with satire, The Year of the Flood complicates oppositions between nature and culture, or religion and technology. Atwood’s ustopian vision shows how narrative itself—through storytelling, prophecy, and hymn—mediates between ecological imaginaries and the pathologies of late capitalism, inviting readers to reflect on how the stories we tell about “nature” shape collective futures in times of crisis.

Paper short abstract

Michel Houellebecq’s ‘neodecadent’ work criticises neoliberal economies, the decline of spirituality, and anti-ageing imperatives in the atheistic West. His dystopian narrative advocates for a sacrality grounded in ritual, resilience, and genuine connection and care.

Paper long abstract

This presentation focuses on contemporary French author Michel Houellebecq’s work, which exposes the speculative consequences of neoliberal competitive market economies and the decline of spirituality in the atheistic West. Drawing on the critical theory of social pathologies as well as gender and age studies, especially literary gerontology, it shows how his écriture grise challenges master discourses of ageing and reveals both capitalist seduction and the disposability of intimate relationships. The bleak portrayal of the deteriorating bodies of his frustrated and depressed middle-aged characters functions as an extended metaphor for today’s broader crises, including anti-ageing imperatives, a sex- and youth-obsessed society, the erosion of traditional family values. This presentation demonstrates how literature serves as a critical space for confronting contemporary social pathologies and declining sacralities. It argues that Houellebecq’s dystopian futuristic narratives, often considered neodecadent and apocalyptic, ultimately advocate for spirituality grounded in ritual, resilience, and community, as well as for genuine human connection and care as a foundation for more sustainable futures and meaningful relationships.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines Ishiguro’s engagement with AI, nature, and spirituality, showing how his work challenges received dichotomies between human and machine, natural and artificial, secular and sacred, offering instead a vision of interdependence shaped by vulnerability and transcendence.

Paper long abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction provides a rich lens for examining the entanglement of human identity, nature, and emergent technologies in the twenty-first century. While his novels are often situated in near-futures shaped by biotechnology and artificial intelligence, they remain deeply attuned to older traditions of meaning-making, particularly those tied to spirituality and our relationship with the natural world. In Klara and the Sun (2021), for example, Ishiguro stages encounters between an artificial friend and the sustaining force of sunlight, suggesting a quasi-religious ecology in which energy, environment, and machine consciousness interpenetrate. Such narratives point to a spirituality of nature that persists even amidst technological upheaval, foregrounding the sun, the landscape, and embodied vulnerability as sources of transcendence. This convergence complicates binary oppositions between the “artificial” and the “organic,” proposing instead that the rise of AI amplifies, rather than erases, our spiritual need to locate meaning beyond the human. Ishiguro’s work therefore challenges deterministic accounts of the AI revolution as either utopian or dystopian: it frames technology as a medium through which anxieties about mortality, kinship, and ecological fragility can be refracted. Reading Ishiguro through the prism of nature spirituality highlights how his speculative fictions function less as predictions of AI’s trajectory than as ethical meditations on interdependence. Ultimately, his narratives invite us to consider how the spiritual imagination might help reorient our collective response to artificial intelligence—ensuring that technological futures remain accountable to ecological balance, human vulnerability, and the transcendent significance of the natural world.