Il/legitimate? Annie Ernaux’s contentious path to the Nobel Prize

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the mass media reception of Annie Ernaux’s 2022 Nobel Prize, particularly the criticisms in the French press. After the award announcement, Ernaux was at once celebrated for her feminist writing and vilified for her socio-ethnographic approach and political engagements. French journalists and critics have deemed her Nobel illegitimate, calling into question the Swedish Academy’s choice. The article probes the concept of ‘il/legitimacy’ by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and by reading Ernaux’s award within three contexts: the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature; mass media evaluations of her works’ aesthetic value; and literary debates about the impact of authors’ politics on their candidacy to the Nobel. I argue that the legitimacy of Ernaux’s Nobel Prize is the result of a process of cultural negotiation involving authors, texts, and individual as well as institutional agents. Becoming a Nobel laureate is a lengthy process that needs to be examined in the light of all these factors.