Annie Ernaux : « engager » la littérature, essai de positionnement théorique

Abstract

Annie Ernaux's desire to create literature that is in some way ‘political’ has constantly been reaffirmed throughout her career as a writer. Drawing primarily on her reflexive writings and statements in interviews, this article constitutes an essay on the ‘theoretical positioning’ of the author's meta-poetic discourses that deal with this question of the political in order to assess which theorizations of ‘engagement’ they underpin, or from which they draw, and to identify any possible ambivalences or aporias. Like academic critics, Ernaux has, herself, emphasized the influence on her work of her readings in sociology, and particularly of Bourdieu. This contribution aims to show what Ernaux's conception of literary ‘engagement’ may also owe to Sartre's theorizations, to which Ernaux does not lay claim, but from which she nonetheless seems to borrow some conceptions and ways of operating. The analysis proposed here thus questions some of the foundations and blind spots of Ernaux's approach to the political.