Annie Ernaux Research Articles

Semiological analysis of obsession in Annie Ernaux’s “Passion Simple”: etude of a dysphoric masculinity

Annie Ernaux, one of the influential female authors of French literature, has become the focal point of the interdisciplinary studies of the 20th century, due to the sociological background of her writings. The simplicity of her language and the strikingness of her realism make the author popular in both individual and social identity studies. In her writings, she conveys to her readers with all sincerity: the woman, the conflict between generations, briefly being the other in a community and the burden it brings. In her novel “Passion simple” (Eng. Simple Passion), the author describes her interest and passion for a married man with all its simplicity and realism in an autobiographical structure. In the novel, Ernaux reveals forbidden love, obsession, the logic of irrationality, the conflict of power and willpower. For this reason, the novel in question has been examined in a social and psychological context where woman is at the centre. The aim of this study is to deal with the other part of the narrative, the man. In the context of the "Masculinities" theories put forward by R.W. Connell, it is aimed to reveal the structure of this other less-mentioned hero of the novel and the obsession it carries in the light of semiotic data. After the analysis of the hero as an individual, it is envisaged to explain and provide the role of this character, who is the focus of passion, in the social structure. In this context, it will be important to examine the adaptation of the man in the novel to gender roles, his contribution to the definition of this role, and how the intersection of culture and identity structures the phenomenon of masculinity. Consequently, the article, drawing on sociologically informed concept of masculinity, aims at bringing a new dimension to the gender-oriented literary criticism on the novel that has hitherto revolved around women, by offering reading focused on the constitution of the identities of men.

Annie Ernaux’s ‘Photojournal’ in Écrire la vie: Photo-Diaristic Archives as a Model of Life Writing

In Ecrire la vie (2011), an anthology of her major works to date, Annie Ernaux published for the first time about eighty images of herself and her family; these pictures are inserted in an opening ‘photojournal’, and combined with extracts from the author’s private diary, thus giving direct access to her past life and to the idiosyncrasies of her self. Readers/viewers are compelled to confront the texts and images and to construct their own reading of the pictures, which can also be matched with the numerous descriptions of photographs in Ernaux’s autobiographical works since La Place (1983). In contrast to Les Années (2008), the writer’s narrative attempt to produce a total and impersonal autobiography, this photo-textual assemblage constitutes an alternative material and archival form of life-writing; it constructs a singular temporality and a list-like, serial aesthetic which directly emanate from specific characteristics of the diary and photography.

La récriture au féminin : La Femme rompue de Simone de Beauvoir et La Femme gelée d’Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux is one of the French successors of Simone de Beauvoir, whose work and ideas have greatly influenced her. Reading The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) was a revelation for Annie Ernaux, who wisely refers to this text several times throughout her work. A resemblance both at formal and thematic levels can be distinguished in several of their books. As for the female question, we see throughout the reading of A Frozen Woman (La Femme gelée) by Annie Ernaux, the echo, even the traces, of The Woman Destroyed (La Femme rompue) by Simone de Beauvoir. What could be the reason for a writer to choose – seemingly voluntarily – content previously covered by another? Much more than tackling the same topics to update them, women’s writing seems to resume, even repeat itself when dealing (from a new angle), with women’s issues that are far from being acquired. In this article, two books of the two authors dealing with the female question will be compared from the point of view of intertextuality and female writing with the aim of understanding the process of rewriting that is revealed in the work of female authors.

To Kill the False Woman: Annie Ernaux Autobiographical Writing in Happening

Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (Happening) stands as a powerful piece of autobiographical discourse and incites discussion in both trauma literature and as an extension of Hélène Cixous’s The laugh of the Medusa. Ernaux’s text revolves around her clandestine abortion, as she writes of her trauma through the event. I will attempt to demonstrate that while the mere act of writing constitutes a form of overcoming traumatic events, Ernaux’s writing goes above and beyond these conventions. To do so, I will analyze how Ernaux’s autobiographical writing combines several discursive, narrative, and literary techniques to firstly meditate and reflect on the past and present, and secondly to reconcile and overcome the past and presents perspectives, or the “unspeakable” incited by rigid social and legal norms. I will further demonstrate how by writing her own body, that is by meditating on the numerous limitations placed on the female body and mind, her literary contribution is two-fold: Ernaux both pays homage to her own personal female experience and represents the collective female experience in a larger, historical context. The result is a re-framing of a feminine narrative into a human question through a validation of Ernaux’s experience.

La puissante écriture intertextuelle de Marie Darrieussecq dans Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes

In 2010 Marie Darrieussecq published Rapport de Police, Accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction as a response to the accusations of plagiarism brought against her by Camille Laurens and Marie NDiaye. In this essay she claims her right to an openly intertextual writing. Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes belongs to this type of writing: Darrieussecq draws strong images from other texts to renew and extend them. In particular, she reworks certain topoi, such as love at first sight, heterosexual passion, and White-Black relations. Her main intertexts are Passion simple by Annie Ernaux, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Apocalypse Now, the film that Francis Ford Coppola made from it. She also uses several texts by Marguerite Duras, as well as songs, proverbs, key sentences, and anecdotes. She thus explores many clichés, including those relating to two legendary places, Hollywood and Africa. This rich intertextuality could have led to the dilution of her own voice if she had not also anchored her text in her own experience, by including the discreet presence of an auctorial I, and by ensuring through a large epitext that the autobiographical comparisons with its protagonist Solange are known as well as the fact that her text was also born from personal research on Africa and Hollywood. With Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, Darrieussecq has written a powerful and personal text despite, or rather thanks to, its vast intertextuality.

‘So thrilling and so alive and so much its own thing’: Talking to Claire-Louise Bennett about Ann Quin

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and went on to complete her debut book, Pond, which was published by The Stinging Fly (Ireland) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in 2015 and by Riverhead (US) in 2016. Pond was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and she also writes about art and is a frequent contributor to frieze. Her novel, Checkout 19, was published by Jonathan Cape in August 2021. In between finishing Pond and writing Checkout 19, she discovered Quin’s work. In 2021 she made a programme for RadioMoLi on Quin, Annie Ernaux and Tove Ditlevsen (https://moli.ie/radio/series/writer-presents/writer-presents-claire-louise-bennett/). Checkout 19 directly engages with Quin and her work, and in this interview she discusses why Quin’s work is so significant for her own.

Temporal Migrations in Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement: Recounting (a) Lived Experience(s) in Abortion Narrative

In Annie Ernaux’s novel, L’Événement (2001), the author writes about her clandestine abortion while she was a college student. Ernaux constructs her narrative through her journal, which serves as proof while also allowing her to relive the experience from forty years before vividly. The narrative describes and recounts Ernaux’s experiences of seeking a person to provide the abortion, the process, and the moments afterward to her reader. Ernaux’s novel offers a temporal retelling through memory from her contemporary time to the past when she had an abortion. It blends the past and present lived experiences, reminding the reader of what was and juxtaposing it with what is. The text illustrates the conditions women experienced in telling their story while juxtaposing it with how women describe their abortion story currently during a time of legal certainty. Ernaux exposes the taboo of telling one’s abortion story. The narrative structure of Ernaux’s text also illustrates the lived experience for women of a particular class without access to abortion by challenging the taboo of discussing an abortion story publicly. This article analyses how Ernaux’s novel explicitly challenges the taboo in both past and present through a feminist narrative that describes a woman’s lived experiences.

Le témoignage entre le « je » et le « nous » ou quand l’intime devient politique dans l’oeuvre d’Annie Ernaux et Chahdortt Djavann

This study offers a critical reading of several contemporary modalities of engagement outlined in the socio-literary trajectories of writers Annie Ernaux and Chahdortt Djavann. In the works of these writers, the dimensions that arise from a desire to renew how the writer intervenes are visible through a writing style which continually blurs the borders between fiction and documentary, individual perceptions of the world and the collective dimension of events. In doing so, it will interrogate the power of witnessing as a means of making possible the interchangeability of that which is private and that which is public.

Voices Carry

AbstractThis article examines the urban fiction of Jeanne Marni’s 1898 Fiacres, a collection of twenty-five stories that first appeared in the daily newspaper Le Temps. The stories are presented in the form of dialogues transcribed by an invisible spectator from within the horse drawn carriages for hire, the fiacres, the fin de siècle taxi cabs. Training her eye on and lending her ear to Belle Époque Paris, Marni registers the conversations of Parisians as they move about the city. In these feminocentric, and by turns humorous or ironic texts, Marni hones an “urban comic” that merges two nineteenth-century figures: the “invisible” flâneuse and the “inaudible” rieuse, or funny woman. Focusing on the intersection of the representation of urban experience and the humorous in Fiacres, this article situates Marni’s sound bites within a genealogy of women writers and the city that looks back to Delphine Gay de Girardin’s witty chronicles of July Monarchy Paris, the “Courrier de Paris” (1836–1848), and ahead to Annie Ernaux’s ironic journal of urban selfhood in transit, Journal du dehors (1993).

Manthia Diawara’s Autoethnographic Forays in Memoir and Film from ‘Counter’ to ‘Strong’ to ‘Beyond’

ABSTRACT In order to suggest the larger terms, parameters, and limits of autoethnographic method in life narrative, this essay explores three life narratives from filmmaker, writer, and critic Manthia Diawara that engage and exemplify different models of autoethnographic method, and points up the interests and issues raised by each. In the films Rouch in Reverse and An Opera of the World and the memoir/short film In Search of Africa, it makes distinctions among counter-ethnography, ‘strong’ autoethnography, and the terrain ‘beyond’ autoethnography and suggests their applicability to the literary memoirs of such writers as Annie Ernaux and Audre Lorde.

Le Luxe de l’écriture: Writing Luxury in Annie Ernaux’s Passion simple and Les Années

Abstract This article examines the concept and experience of luxury in Annie Ernaux’s work, starting from an observation made towards the end of Passion simple (1991) that luxury no longer represents for the author ‘manteaux de fourrure, [des] robes longues et [des] villas au bord de la mer’, but ‘aussi de pouvoir vivre une passion’. Though the temptation, given Ernaux’s stated admiration for Pierre Bourdieu’s œuvre, is to approach luxury through a lens of sociological distinction, the article argues that a more intricate unfolding of the concept can be traced within her texts. Through readings of Passion simple and Les Années, I suggest that Ernaux’s search for a writing outside the self that stringently rejects bourgeois literary values echoes visions of writing — such as those found at various points in the work of Hélène Cixous, Roland Barthes, and Georges Bataille, for example — as a form of total expenditure that cannot be harnessed to late capitalism’s exchange economy. Additionally borrowing from the thought of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, I argue that the thrilling loss of sovereignty Ernaux finds in the experience of absolute eroticism and écriture in Passion simple is extended in Les Années into a sociology of writerly vacation, where the luxurious dispersal of the first person makes way for a situated, politically operative being-in-common.

People watching: the static “I” and mobile travellees

ABSTRACT Whenever the forward movement of the narrative slows down – or stops completely – travel writing often realigns its representation of other people. Instead of a mobile protagonist who notes the existence of largely static and featureless by-standers with no history to speak of, the polarities are reversed, so that it is the travellees who are the ones who move, passing by – or revolving around – a traveller who stays put with apparently little choice but to engage with them at length or in depth, if only on the page. This article examines different ways “people watching” figures in non-fiction writings in which the “I” barely moves and the impact this has on the forms of characterisation they use and the relative importance assigned to the observer and observed. Examples are drawn from texts by Alain de Botton, Roger Green, Sophie Calle, Annie Ernaux and Behrouz Boochani.

The Author Disappearing? Authorial “Surrogates” and Contemporary Self/Other-Writing in Selected Works by Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, and Rachel Cusk

The Author Disappearing? Authorial “Surrogates” and Contemporary Self/Other-Writing in Selected Works by Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, and Rachel Cusk

Tertium non datur

The books by Annie Ernaux and Didier Eribon can be interpreted as testimonies of the struggle for belonging. With their rich descriptions of growing up in poverty, of shame and degradation, they make an important contribution to the analysis of orders of belonging. Educational institutions play a significant role in this. In this way, Ernaux and Eribon shed light on the mechanisms through which belonging is created or denied.

"Sluttish" Annie: Ernaux's Mémoire de fille, Female Agency, and Empowerment

One year before the Time's Up and #balancetonporc movements, in Mémoire de fille Annie Ernaux broke the silence over her traumatic first sexual experience (already transposed in the 1977 Ce qu'ils disent ou rien) and minutely detailed the slut-shaming campaign (and its aftermath) she was subjected to as a 17-yearold summer camp counselor. This article exposes the gender roles and double standards in 1958 France and shows how Ernaux's "pig-outing" and embrace of the slur sluttish "enabled" her (in Judith Butler's terms) to rescue her young self from sexual victimization. With its affirmation of women's and girls' right to sexual agency, this disclosure narrative can be viewed as a tool for empowerment and contributes to bringing forth a culture shift.

The individual and the social in Annie Ernaux's autobiographical writing

This article examines the ideological and aesthetic peculiarities of autobiographical writing in “La Place” by Annie Ernaux, a well-known contemporary French writer. We argue that Annie Ernaux 's “flat writing” is close to a sociological or ethnographic study and nearly devoid of any autobiographical subjectivity. Autobiographical writing is approached through the concept of symbolic violence, borrowed from the sociologist P. Bourdieu. Ernaux indeed replaces event history, a feature of autobiography, by the study of socio-historical causes of “class distancing” between father and daughter. The analysis of key concepts of the Ernaux's poetics makes it possible, on the one hand, to grasp the appearance of social and cultural alienation and, on the other hand, to achieve a social criticism of reality.

Annie Ernaux’nun Yalın Tutku romanında kadınlık durumu

Yalın Tutku’da, (Passion Simple) öteki romanlarında olduğu gibi Ernaux’nun yaşamına yön veren kişisel olaylar öykülenir. Biçemsel açıdan yeniötesi küçürek (fr. minimaliste) anlatının kimi ayırtlarını taşıyan Yalın Tutku, ‘sevgiye yabancılaşma, tutkunun kölesi olma ve duygusal şiddete uğrama’ gibi izlekleri okura çok çarpıcı biçimde sunan bir özkurmaca benli anlatıdır. Özanlatıcı kadın başkişi, Rus bir diplomata duyduğu yasak aşkın nasıl kösnül bir tutkuya ve sanrıya dönüştüğünü, bu çeşit bir insanca deneyimin herkesi, her an, her yerde bulabileceği olgusunu, tekil birinci kişi ben adılıyla çok açık seçik bir yalınlıkla ve korkusuzca geçmişiyle şimdiyi toplumsal bir süzgeçten geçirerek öyküler. O, aile geçmişiyle de bir hesaplaşmaya girerek, toplumsala boyun eğen kadından, nasıl özgür kadın kimliğine kavuştuğunu anlatarak, geleneksel ataerkil kadın algısını ters yüz etmek ister. Çalışmada, duygusal ve kösnül bir şiddetin sarmalında öz kimliğiyle var olmaya çalışarak kuralcı bir karşı cins baskısına ve toplumsal düzene başkaldıran ve Simone de Beauvoir’ın “Kadın Doğulmaz, Kadın Olunur” savsözünü usa getiren bir kadının tutkulu tutsaklığını izleksel yaklaşımla incelemeyi deneyeceğiz.

Annie Ernaux’da “Ruhun Tutkuları” ya da “Tutkunun Ruhu”

XXI. yüzyıl Fransız Edebiyatının en büyük kadın yazarlarından Annie Ernaux kadın kimliği ve psikolojisi alanında çok sayıda eser vermiştir. Eserlerinde kendi içsel yolculuğunun ve bunun toplumsal karşılıklarının peşine düşmüş, bazen bir kişiyi, bazen de bir duyguyu konu almıştır. İçeriği başlığıyla uyum gösteren ve Türkçeye de “Yalın Tutku” adıyla çevrilmiş olan romanında da, yazar evli bir erkekle yaşadığı duygusal ilişkiyi bütün açıklığıyla, cesurca ortaya koymaktadır. Gençlik yıllarından itibaren, yazar için bir var olma biçimi olan tutku, bu romanda farklı bileşenleriyle kaleme alınmıştır. Kadının beklentileri üzerine kurulu bu ilişkide, sevgiliyle her bir buluşma kadın için bir yaşam kaynağı haline gelir. Kadının bedenini, ruhunu, zihnini ele geçiren ve şiddetli ve yıkıcı bir saplantıya dönüşen tutku onda tüm yaratıcı yetilerini harekete geçiren karşı konmaz bir güçtür. Ernaux bu yönüyle insan iradesini hiçliğe indirgeyip körleştiren; kendi “yasa”larının dışında, içinde başka hiçbir şeyi barındırmayan klasik “tutku-aşk”ın “fatal” boyutunu aşarak, tutkusunda sınırsız bir özgürlük tanıyor kendisine. Tutku, yazar olarak yaratıcılığını besliyor, tetikliyor; onu bir dize ruhsal çözümlemelerin içine itiyor. Bu incelemede, tutkuyu bir ruhsal “anomalie” olarak değil, insanın iç dünyasını tanımak için önemli bir “yüzleşme deneyimi” olarak gören Descartes’ın “Ruhun Tutkuları” adlı eseri kuramsal çerçeve olarak benimsenecektir.

Calligraphy or Photography? Representations of the City in Michaël Ferrier’s Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube

This article examines Michael Ferrier’s ‘La chambre du fond : quatre essais de kanjis malgre la nuit’, one chapter of his Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube, as an instance of a writing which positions itself against an ‘ecriture photographique’ – as defined by writers such as Herve Guibert or Annie Ernaux – and models itself instead on Japanese calligraphy. I argue that Ferrier thus effects an instance of ‘aesthetic translation’ (Pamela A. Genova), translating the principles and praxis of Japanese calligraphy into a prose which therefore has ‘Japaneseness’ woven into its narrative structures at the same time as representing aspects of Japanese culture. Writing is thus foregrounded as both form and content in this brief essay on Tokyo; but at the end of his work, Ferrier acknowledges the dominance of photography in contemporary art, especially in depictions of Japan, and works it into his own calligraphic and writerly representation of the city.

Écriture de soi et identité énonciative dans Mémoire de fille d’Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux's most recent novel, 'Memoire de fille' (2016), subverts the enunciative norm of the classic autobiographical novel by dissociating the narrative subject from the narrated subject. Thr...