Current debates about the possible causes of depression reinforce the age-old body–mind dualism: while some claim that depression is caused by psychological or societal stress, others underline that it results from a shortage of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the central nervous system. This paper shows that Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Serotonin can be read as an account of depression that goes beyond this body–mind dualism. Moreover, we will argue that his way of narrating invites us to reconsider the restorative power of narrative in ‘pathography,’ a genre that is a primary focus within medical humanities. The first section of the paper discusses, while drawing on Wilson’s work on new materialism, that although the title of the novel Serotonin may suggest that Houellebecq takes sides with those who believe that depression is a brain disease, the protagonist of the novel suffers mainly from his gut feelings, which affects his entire embodied existence. Against the background of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the second section specifies this existential disruption in terms of an embodied ‘I cannot.’ In the third section, we make clear how Houellebecq’s way of narrating—plotless and episodic—reinforces these embodied feelings of incapacity. The final section, then, traces how Houellebecq, by means of his style of writing and his choice of themes, succeeds in transferring gut feelings onto the reader. If illness narratives aim at sharing experiences of illness, the ‘narrative’ of depression, so we argue, had better take the form of an anti-narrative or a chaos story. Indeed, Houellebecq’s anti-narrative succeeds in passing on to the reader the experience of a debilitating gut feeling, and a gradual loss of grip that manifests itself as a temporal and spatial disorientation.

Inge van de Ven & Ties van GemertTo cite this article: Inge van de Ven & Ties van Gemert (2020): Filter bubbles and guru effects: Jordan B. Peterson as a public intellectual in the attention economy, Celebrity Studies,

This article reflects on transformations of modes of reading in an information age, asking what “creative reading” entails in information‐intensive, multimodal environments. We currently face the challenge of the development of reading strategies that oscillate between “close” and “distant” reading. For years, these reading strategies have been a topic of debate between practitioners of Digital Humanities on the one hand, and “traditional” humanists on the other. This ongoing polemics presents reading methods in an unnecessarily polarized manner. I argue that creativity research can be operationalized to come to a more productive model to characterize the ways we read in an information age. I show that the “schism” between close and distant reading is structured around a number of apparent paradoxes that I unravel such as hyper‐ and deep attention/attention and distraction, and convergence and divergence. The paradox of creativity resides in the fact that we find convergence in divergence and vice versa, that the two by definition intertwine. Building on these concepts, I propose a model that considers reading in terms of scale variance. I suggest the humanities turn to creativity research and the interrelations between divergent‐exploratory and convergent‐integrative thinking (Lubart), for a conceptual framework that will allow us to train students on all levels how to read (and how and when not to read), in an information age.

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