Annie Ernaux Research Articles

Proses du monde: les enjeux sociaux des styles littéraires par by Nelly Wolf

Reviews 247 Barthes’s travels in his writing and personal relationships. Stafford contemplates a series of important voyages, including a number of influential trips to the Far East (89), as well as his residency in Morocco in the late 1960s while working as a visiting professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat (104). The 1970s ushered in a new era, and as the biographer states, Barthes returned to a“new, more modern France”(114). His homecoming was marked by increased public interest in his work, opening up a vulnerable space of intimacy characterized in part by veiled homosexuality. Such an invasion of the private propelled Barthes to analyze constructs of self, culminating in the publication of Sade, Fourier et Loyola. Non-Barthesian scholars will be interested to learn that the writer equally turned to unconventional subject matter in his quest to study language and form, including an often-overlooked preoccupation with fashion, which he studied through a post-structuralist lens. According to him, any given outfit can be redefined and redirected through a series of micro-changes (117). The simplicity and ease of Stafford’s writing style is refreshing and welcomed, although this series is not intended to challenge or displace more exhaustive biographical studies—but rather frame and contextualize significant events and writings, as a springboard for further analyses. Utah Valley University Walter S. Temple Wolf, Nelly. Proses du monde: les enjeux sociaux des styles littéraires. Lille: PU du Septentrion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7574-0608-3. Pp. 262. 24 a. Published a decade after Le roman de la démocratie (PU de Vincennes, 2003) established an analogy between the modern novel and real-world democracy, Wolf’s ambitious study takes a similar sociocritical approach to textual analysis. Expanding upon Claude Duchet’s concept of une socialité des textes littéraires,Wolf shifts her focus to what she calls la socialité des styles romanesques and brings to light historical and political dimensions—so many enjeux sociaux—that inform the novel’s linguistic, rhetorical, lexical, and narrative features. Wolf proceeds from a concept of literary style defined as “l’empreinte d’un écrivain dans la langue,” and performs a series of detailed sociolectures on a corpus of more than a dozen novels written since the French Revolution (15). The book’s case studies are grouped into four tableaux of roughly equal length, each of which corresponds to a particular period in French history as well as to a seminal moment in the evolution of literary style. In the initial chapter titled Peuple,Wolf constructs a taxonomy of modes de diction démocratique— transactional,citational,fusional,and consensual—to illustrate the stylistic mechanisms through which the spoken and written language typical of the popular classes, immigrants , and religious minorities worked their way into French literary language over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Wolf’s first two modes will be familiar to readers of Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert—think of the incipit of Un cœur simple or the use of argot in Les misérables—it is in elaborating how the latter two modes gain prominence over time that Proses du monde presents intriguing possibilities for rethinking the dynamic linking history, society, and the literary imagination. Starting with George Sand’s halting quest for a stylistic framework that would accommodate both the popular language of her “democratic” characters and the narrative voice of an educated écrivaine-menuisier, Proses du monde traces the evolution of novelistic style from the privileging of a common national language in the experimental novels of Zola, to the écriture blanche associated with Camus and RobbeGrillet , to the elliptical sentences of Modiano’s amnesiac narrators, to Annie Ernaux’s signature écriture plate. The chapter“Migrations”examines how stylistic choices made by twentieth-century Jewish writers like Albert Cohen and Irène Némirovsky converted the limited social capital of immigrants into cultural assets that improved their standing within an increasingly democratic civil and literary society. In contrast, the final two chapters document the eclipse of the roman engagé and the postwar rise of a formalisme triomphant, which reflected a desire for greater artistic autonomy on the part of a generation of writers reluctant...

Le Projet thérapeutique de la littérature contemporaine française

ABSTRACTFrom Emmanuel Carrère to Annie Ernaux, including François Bon or Pierre Michon, saving, healing, helping, or even modestly acting on our individual or collective suffering, seems now the objective, often explicit, at the heart of library projects. I would like to analyze the assumption and consequence of such a therapeutic paradigm for the understanding and definition of the contemporary literature.

UNE MORT TRÈS DOUCE VE UNE FEMME ADLI ESERLERDE KADIN KİMLİĞİNİN TOPLUMSAL BOYUTLARI

Bu calismada yirminci yuzyilin iki buyuk kadin yazari, Simone de Beauvoir ve Annie Ernaux’nun aile cevreleri uzerinden kendi kadin kimliklerini sorguladiklari Une mort tres douce ve Une Femme adli eserleri karsilastirmali olarak ele alinmistir. Calismada, her iki eserde uc kusak Fransiz kadinin (anlatici, anne ve buyukanne) ait olduklari aileler farkli donem kesitleriyle, her doneme ozgu deger yargilariyla, kadinin toplumsal hayattaki konumu goz onunde bulundurularak incelenmistir. Yasam oykuleri acisindan benzerlikler iceren her iki yazarin bireysel ve toplumsal planda kadin kimliklerinin olusmasinda buyuk oranda aile yasamlarinin belirleyici oldugu gorulmustur. Buyukanne kusagi, otorite ve korkuya dayali, kadin egitiminin nerdeyse hice sayildigi bir toplumsal ve kulturel ortamda yetismistir. Anne kusagi ise, gelenegin belirledigi otoriter aile kadini olmak ile, uygun firsatlarda da modern olana yuzunu donmek arasinda bir gelgit yasamis olsa da, kizlarinin daha mutlu yasayabilmesi icin egitimi ve okumayi onemseyip tesvik etmislerdir. Yazarlarin temsil ettigi kadin kusagina gelince; bu kusak kadinlar geleneksel degerlerin baskilayici kurallarina karsin, kendi adlarina, kendileri icin ve kendi kendilerine bir kimlik olusturma savasimi icinde olmuslar; kadin kimliginin toplumsal boyutunun bireysel boyutla ic iceligini one cikararak, kadinin toplumsal hayattaki yerini saglamlastirmanin, aile, gelenek ve toplumsal sinif aidiyetinin otesinde bireysel bilincten gectigini ortaya koymuslardir. Anahtar Sozcukler: Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Bir Kadin, Une mort tres douce, Kadin. THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE IDENTITY OF WOMAN IN “ UNE MORT TRES DOUCE ”AND “ UNE FEMME ” Abstract : In this study, twentieth century’s two great works by women writers, Simone de Beauvoir’s “ Une mort tres douce ” and Annie Ernaux’s “ Une femme ”, in which they questioned their own female identity through their familial circles, will be comparatively studied. In both works, three generations of French women (narrator, mother and grandmother) are studied by focusing on different periods in their family history, values peculiar to every period, and women’s position in society. Many similarities can be seen between both writers and their identity as women are shaped by their familial lives. The generation of the grandmother grew in a cultural and social environment in which women are disciplined with fears and strict authority and their right to education was ignored. The generation of the mother lived through a turbulent transition period in which women were in-between the traditional female roles and models of modern womanhood, but they encouraged their daughters to further education. As for the generation represented by the narrator, women rebelled against the oppression of the traditional female roles, and they strove to build an identity particular to themselves, depending on their own resources. They revealed the intricate relations between the social and individual dimensions of female identity, and put forward that the empowerment of the women in social life is about the improvement of the individual consciousness more than familial, traditional and class identities. Keywords : Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Une Femme , Une mort tres douce , Woman.

Delphine de Vigan's Pathographies: Writing as a Response to Trauma and Illness

Delphine de Vigan's PathographiesWriting as a Response to Trauma and Illness Caroline Verdier (bio) Award-winning French writer Delphine de Vigan's career took off in 2008 with her acclaimed novel No et Moi, but she is now better known for her 2011 offering, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit, in which she attempted to "write [her] mother" ("écrire [sa] mère"), to tell the story of her family and how they coped with her mother's bipolar disorder.1 She had published her first novel, Jours sans faim, in 2001 under the pseudonym Lou Delvig, an account of nineteen-year-old Laure's anorexia and her stay in the hospital to overcome it.2 It later emerged, however, that this account was inspired by Vigan's experience. Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit and Jours sans faim have respectively been labelled as a family novel and an autofiction, and there is no denying that, in the case of Vigan as in that of many other writers, family is "at the origin of the need to write" ("à l'origine du besoin d'écrire").3 Nor is she the first to write about illness and/or trauma. Within contemporary literature in French, many famous names come to mind such as Annie Ernaux, Lydia Flem, Chloé Delaume, and Lorette Nobécourt, to mention but a few. Yet, the case of Vigan's writing is interesting to study, as a close reading of the two aforementioned texts reveals how both stories overlap and inform each other, and could almost form a single narrative. Indeed, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit provides the reader of Jours sans faim with a fuller picture of her mother's illness and suicide at age sixty-one, what led Vigan [End Page 87] to become anorexic, and how writing helped her come to terms with both experiences. One could almost insert Jours sans faim in the middle of Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit to expand it. Similarly, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit provides further details to Jours sans faim, which, as Damlé points out, contains "notable gaps and ellipses in Laure's story."4 Along with illness, trauma links and permeates both narratives; as such, in this article, I would like to go beyond the family novel and the autofiction readings associated with these two texts and look at how family, transgression, trauma, illness, and writing are intrinsically linked in Vigan's writing. This analysis will also show how Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit can be labelled a pathography—a comprehensive account of one's life including illness—and Jours sans faim an autopathofiction—referring to the combined genres of autofiction and autopathography,5 and how writing these accounts helped Vigan as a patient and as a daughter. This is an approach that echoes Anne Hunsaker Hawkins's view that pathographies "are as much autobiographical accounts of the author's experience as witness as they are biographical accounts of another's illness and death."6 ________ Let us first focus on family and transgressions as roots for trauma and illness. Since, in the two narratives in question, the transgressions, both physical and mental, take place within the family sphere, it only seems appropriate to start this analysis with Vigan's view of her family: My family embodies the noisiest, most spectacular kind of joy, the unrelenting echo of the dead, and the repercussions of disaster. Today I know that, like so many other families, it also illustrates the destructive power of words, and of silence. (Ma famille incarne ce que la joie a de plus bruyant, de plus spectaculaire, l'écho inlassable des morts, et le retentissement du désastre. Aujourd'hui je sais aussi qu'elle illustre, comme tant d'autres familles, le pouvoir de destruction du verbe, et celui du silence.)7 This quotation features many aspects linked to trauma, with words such as "désastre," "pouvoir," and "silence." Indeed, in Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit the various transgressions—along with the traumas they caused—remain unspoken, and all the family members (at least before Vigan) abide by [End Page 88] the omertà that is implicitly dictated by Vigan's...

Factographies: l’enregistrement littéraire à l’époque contemporaine par Marie-Jeanne Zenetti

self-aware, and iconoclastic. Rimbaud takes center stage in the volume’s two central chapters, though Whidden frames Rimbaud’s revolutionary poetics within collective contexts. Chapter two analyzes the toppling of theVendôme Column by Communards, an act evoked for its symbolic value, as “a direct blow to manifestations of authority” (73); Whidden argues that the destruction of the Column likewise served as a clear inspiration to Rimbaud’s famous “Seer Letters” of May 1871 (81). The chapter also analyzes the Album zutique in detail, emphasizing the collaborative dimension of this project, though still reserving the spotlight for Rimbaud: “while other nineteenthcentury authors used some of the same tactics in pushing forms of authority to their breaking point, none shared Rimbaud’s brilliance in combining rich parody of other authorial presences with the methodical dismantling of French verse” (98). Chapter three continues with close readings of Rimbaud’s poems from the Commune era and from Une saison en enfer, focusing in particular on the unsettling representations of subjectivity which these works articulate: the individual lyrical je gives way to more complex articulations of multiple selfhoods. Chapter four turns away from Rimbaud and from verse in order to consider struggles for control of a hot-air balloon and of narrative authority in Jules Verne’s short story “Un drame dans les airs.” Rather an hors-d’oeuvre, this is the only chapter that does not feature Rimbaud, the star player who is billed as part of an ensemble cast. One cannot help noticing how neatly Whidden’s exegesis parallels Rimbaud’s own poetic project. If “Je est un autre,”perhaps Rimbaud’s subversive contribution to French verse is most fittingly measured in the context of the crowd:“a scene based no longer on the individual but rather on one that exists, and persists, amid a sea of increasing multiples” (112). Altogether, Authority in Crisis is a compelling and thought-provoking read. Arcadia University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Zenetti,Marie-Jeanne.Factographies:l’enregistrementlittéraireàl’époquecontemporaine. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2545-5. Pp. 378. 34 a. In an effort to describe a new kind of writing based on non-fictional texts, Zenetti explores various dimensions of what she identifies as factographies. The term refers to literary works that seek to present documentary evidence directly without embellishment by the author, in some cases resembling faits divers. Factographies can be traced back to the Russian Constructivists of the 1920s who developed techniques such as photomontage for creating works representing social reality. Zenetti refers to La préparation du Roman by Roland Barthes where he explores how the haiku makes use of fragmentary discourse that resists personal expression and narrative but evokes lived experience with multiple meanings. Because factographies defy traditional notions of literary creation and reception, Zenetti examines the genre from several angles. Her analysis is based on a corpus of ten works published in France, Germany, and the 214 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 215 United States between 1960 and 2010, among them Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien and Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errances et d’espoir, as well as works by Annie Ernaux and Marcel Cohen. The techniques used to produce these works include direct documentation through notation and transcription, copying and pasting, and textual montage. Zenetti discerns in these works an effet de document, which invites the reader to interpret the text as evidentiary and non-imaginary, and an effet de littérarité, where the reader approaches the text aesthetically within a literary tradition. The tension between these two effets leads Zenetti to determine empirically how readers ascertain the genre of factographies. She solicits reader responses from fifty volunteers at the university level (students and instructors), and her analyses of the questionnaires reveal that readers notice a pronounced lack of continuity or intention among textual elements. Readers accustomed to performing traditional explications de texte find factographies difficult to interpret. Zenetti refers to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, Stanley Fish’s notion of interpretive communities, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage to show that readers nevertheless overcome the apparent lack of authorial presence and engage in processes of recombining and...

The Paris Métro and urban experience in Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and Céline Curiol’s Voix sans issue

According to Marc Augé, contemporary urban life generates non-places, meaningless spaces of transit and anonymity. I discuss the form taken by the idea of the non-place in contemporary representations of the Paris Métro, with a focus on women’s urban experiences in Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and Céline Curiol’s Voix sans issue. I argue that there are no fixed non-places; the experience of place is always subjective. The Métro can be seen momentarily as a non-place when it reflects the character’s state of mind, but it can also be a meaningful place, connected to the character’s identity and history.

Aventures et expériences: écritures des femmes en France au début du vingt-et-unième siècle

This first French-language study to analyse French women's writing in the twenty-first century complements the two English-language volumes on contemporary French women's writing also co-edited by Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye. This latest volume includes some of the authors analysed in the other studies, but also extends the range of writers under consideration, treating such well-known figures as Christine Angot and Annie Ernaux alongside less familiar names such as Bessora and Gwenaëlle Aubry. The book aims to introduce these writers to a wider readership, as well as to open up the parameters of criticism on contemporary women's writing in French in order to embrace new subjects, themes, and textual practices. The first part, ‘Aventures autobiographiques’, focuses on autobiographical experimentation, beginning with a chapter that poses the provocative question as to whether Christine Angot's perpetual renegotiation of the conventions of autobiographical writing may be seen to have ‘killed’ the concept of autofiction that has frequently been associated with women's writing in particular. The last chapter in the first part of the volume offers a sensitive analysis of the fragile yet fertile connection between love and knowledge that mobilizes alternative forms of encounter and exchange and goes beyond common feminist interpretations of love in terms of romance or sexuality. The second part of the volume, ‘Aventures sociales, philosophiques et politiques’, addresses wider sociopolitical and philosophical issues affecting women's lives in the twenty-first century, including sexual violence, old age, marriage, and, in the two chapters that end the collection, the representation of the ‘post-human’. The division between ‘Aventures autobiographiques’ and ‘Aventures sociales, philosophiques et politiques’ is not entirely sustained, as chapters in the former part of the volume also address philosophical and social questions, but this is inevitable in a project whose strength lies partly in the way it entwines textual and psycho-social innovation and re-invention. The emphasis throughout the volume is on encounters and relations, be it between human subjects (evident in the later chapters, which address broader social issues through the ways in which they inflect interpersonal relationships, such as in marriage or in relations of violence); or between text, representation, and reader; or, as is the case in most of the chapters, mediating between these different aspects. This volume is to be welcomed for the way in which, rather than attempting to provide a straightforward overview of early twenty-first-century French writing by women, it seeks instead to open up new subjects and avenues of criticism, making space for alternative ways of conceiving of contemporary women's writing in French.

Mythes et erotismes dans les litteratures et les cultures francophones de l'extreme contemporain

The aims and claims of this collection are ambitious. It sets out to shed new light on the field of the erotic in contemporary French and francophone literature and culture through a critical approach that conjoins eroticism and myth. In so doing it purports to renew women's studies, and, more broadly, gender studies, within the French and francophone worlds. Over its fourteen chapters it aims to map new tendencies in current erotic writing by both women and men. The volume's foundational apparatus (an Introduction and a lengthy first chapter on ‘La Crise de l'éternel féminin’ in contemporary francophone erotic texts by women) covers some of the key works, authors, and developments that have become closely associated over the last twenty years with a new era of frank and experimental sexual writing. While interesting, these introductory essays rehearse much that is already known and do not offer new critical paradigms. For the main part, subsequent chapters focus on female creators (only one chapter, on Michel Houellebecq, is devoted to a male writer). Some fairly familiar arguments are made in chapters on Catherine Breillat, Annie Ernaux, Calixthe Beyala, and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. Also covered are the erotic writings of Gabriel Osmonde (Andreï Makine's alter ego); the intermingling of erotic and political registers in Milan Kundera and Nancy Huston; the influence of the father in the unfolding of desire in Houellebecq and Nina Bouaroui; and the self-destructive and toxic eroticism of protagonists in the work of québécoise writer Marie-Sissi Labrèche. There are chapters, too, that have a broader scope, setting out to examine, for example, the expression of sexuality in Moroccan women's writing; the body and sensuality in Algerian women's writing; sexuality as it emerges from, and remains tainted by, slavery in Antillean literature. All chapters offer coherent readings, but several remain somewhat underdeveloped in terms of critical apparatus. Many of the arguments made in this volume are already very well covered in the wealth of secondary literature that has been published to date, in French and in English, on the core corpus. Most surprisingly, relatively little of this material is referenced or engaged with. Finally, the idea of myth does not emerge from the essays as systematically as one might expect. It is taken up via a general interest in how selected authors and texts deconstruct certain myths about gender and unpick normative views — thus Ernaux evokes and works against myths of feminine passivity; Houellebecq explodes myths of love; Despentes, of heteronormative culture; Breillat, of the obscenity that accretes to woman's body — yet these gestures scarcely feel new. Ultimately, while the volume captures a sense of the recent proliferation of sexually explicit works and the ways in which these have destabilized preconceptions, it does not quite live up to the claims it makes for itself.

Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture by John Patrick Walsh

Reviews 203 Robin tells us, the long, high-speed walkway has been retired after many mishaps), the shopping mall and giant Monoprix, and the unusual 750-unit apartment complex where Robin herself has chosen to live.Although a devoted Parisian often to be found, like her predecessors, writing in the Select, Robin nonetheless understands the necessity of modernization and continual change if Paris is to remain a living city. While many of us can resonate to Robin’s loving analysis of the new Montparnasse, her discovery of the more recently modernized areas on either end of the Simone de Beauvoir bridge may be a step into the as-yet-unknown. Robin welcomes the transformation of the old wine chais of Bercy, where she now happily visits the Cinémathèque, and looks forward to the transformation of the rapidly modernizing area around the Bibliothèque nationale into a new Quartier latin. Moving outward, Robin undertakes a study of the Parisian banlieue—a term best used in the plural, since the regions beyond the périphérique range from immigrant ghettos in the north to the impersonal commuter suburbs of the west, well described by Annie Ernaux. Robin explores the proposals to integrate and connect the various regions beyond the current urban boundaries in order to create a“Grand Paris”:“Paris-Métropole ou Paris-Mégapole, cela voudra simplement dire qu’on pourra s’identifier à l’ensemble de ses paysages, que la ville métamorphosée continuera à nous faire rêver” (325). Dartmouth University (NH) Mary Jean Green Walsh, John Patrick. Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-253-00627. Pp. 206. $75. This analytical study, which draws from history, politics, culture, and literature, focuses new light on two of the most influential leaders in the history of the French Caribbean territories: Louverture and Césaire. The author divides his analysis into two parts: the first studies various letters, proclamations, and reports written by Toussaint during the beginning of the Haitian revolution, and the second is devoted to the literary and political writings Césaire produced during the departmentalization of the French Caribbean colonies.Walsh’s introduction depicts the 2009 general strike in Guadeloupe when protesters demanded an end to the colonial structure of the relationship between the overseas departments and metropolitan France. The “push and pull” between autonomy and assimilation, which has gone on between metropolitan France and the Caribbean regions since the nineteenth-century rebellion in Saint-Domingue, serves as the basis of Walsh’s book. His comparison of Toussaint and Césaire’s writings reveals how both men fought the forces of French colonialism and slavery while also taking compromising positions. Walsh draws parallels between the writers’demands for freedom while remaining part of France, giving rise to the expression , “free and French.” Readers will not find here a history of Haiti and the French Caribbean. Instead, they will discover detailed analyses of a variety of texts written approximately 150 years apart by the two leaders, along with a review of earlier scholarship and theoretical considerations. Each of the two parts of the book is focused on key works of Toussaint and Césaire. In the chapters on Toussaint,Walsh conducts close readingsof two,oftenmisunderstood,documents—the1801ConstitutionandToussaint’s Mémoire. For Walsh, these writings are multi-layered narratives that reveal contradictions between the ideals of universal freedom and re-emerging policies on slavery. The chapters on Césaire contain studies of earlier critical works about Haiti followed by close analyses of Césaire’s historical essay,Toussaint Louverture: la révolution française et le problème colonial, and his Tragédie du roi Christophe. In both parts of the book, Walsh grounds his analyses in sufficient historical background so that the reader can better understand the context of the writings. An important unifying element that Walsh explores throughout is a metaphor of the family romance that he identifies in Toussaint’s political writings. This trope, which Walsh connects to a 1798 letter Toussaint addressed to his sons, is representative of Toussaint’s relationship between the French government and the people...

Writing the Pregnant Body in Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays (2005)

In the early 1990s, a number of commercially and critically successful French writers began examining the lived experiences of the female reproductive body, tapping them for both creative inspiration and critical reflection, while expressing them through the voice of the reproductive subject. Previously, narratives of reproduction recounted from the first-person narrator’s perspective had been few in French fiction and works centrally concerned with these experiences were rare. This paper first identifies some key works within this ever-growing corpus that I refer to as “hysterographies” (writings of the womb). With this term, I unite first-person narratives that capture women’s perceptions of their bodies during reproductive or sterile experiences as they innovate, reflect on their writing, and engage with the contemporary medical establishment. The authors engaging in such works include quite recognizable names from Marie Redonnet, Christine Angot, and Louise Lambrichs to Justine Levy, Marie NDiaye, and Annie Ernaux—just to name a few. Next, this paper takes a closer look at the narrative techniques and formal experimentation that one hysterography, Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays (2005), employs to articulate the experiences of the narrator’s shifting relationship to her pregnant body. Structurally, the narrative is recounted from two alternating perspectives—one in the third-person observing the protagonist’s life (external focalization), and the other in first-person interior monologue (internal focalization) visually illustrated with boldface print. The two layers of this work intertwine and diverge exposing a variety of relationships between the body and the world in which it lives. Darrieussecq uses the consistent alternation of these points of view, combined with an innovative fusion of genres highlighting sounds (poetic couplets, transcribed music, onomatopoeia), to communicate the experience of pregnancy. Just as a sonogram reveals a fetus, the two perspectives project sounds that chart both an inner and outer geography of the pregnant body, while exploring its experiences and (pro)creative possibilities.

Annie Ernaux, 1989: Diaries, Photographic Writing and Self-Vivisection

This article attempts to create a portrait of ‘Annie Ernaux’ in 1989, by examining her acts of self-portrayal in that year in Se perdre, Journal du dehors, L'Atelier noir and Passion simple. It describes and analyses her practice of a ‘photographic writing’ in her diaries, and links this to her preference for the material over the abstract, which leads her to examine the traces left by her self in her diaries as concrete evidence of her passage through time. This auto-ethnological approach culminates in the dissection of her thoughts and feelings, in L'Atelier noir, even as she is experiencing them – in ‘real time’ – a practice I call ‘self-vivisection’. The article concludes that the presence in the public domain of Ernaux's various kinds of self-writing, which all bear a relation to the photographic medium, might be said to constitute a composite photograph of her ‘self’ in 1989.

Picturing Pain and Pleasure in Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo

French writer Annie Ernaux has long foregrounded physical and emotional sensations as building blocks of her autobiographical writing. (1) However, it is in L'Usage de la photo (2005) where connection between body and subjectivity most powerfully emerges. Co-written by then lover Marc Marie, text is organized around fourteen photos of different rooms after a night of lovemaking and authors' reflections on images to offer a plurinarrative recounting of Ernaux's battle with breast cancer and her love affair with Marie. The text's visual imagery thus has an evident temporal function, since it situates author's battle with breast cancer and relationship with Marie between March 2003 and January 2004. Yet photos play out a second and more significant epistemological instance in that they represent limits of transforming corporeal experience into narrative. (2) Indeed, L'Usage's concerted juxtaposition of struggle to survive with a sensuous connection to her body brings new insight into an enduring feature of Ernaux's oeuvre: strained relationship to body as a source of knowledge formation, gendered identity, and empowerment. While book works within her traditional framework of sexual discovery, gender, and everyday life and showcases Ernaux's characteristic blend of autobiographical writing, journal in-time narratives, and episodic remembrance, (3) its primary thematic concerns of desire, health, and illness reconfigure relations between body and identity that have previously emerged in her work. Whereas dominant cultural markers such as marriage, education, and family relations underscore body as a driving force that enables her to assess intersections of self and society, role of body in transformational experiences of self-knowledge takes on a new urgency in light of Ernaux's diagnosis with breast cancer. Distilled to their most insistent forms of pleasure and pain, corporeal sensations in L'Usage de la photo become testing ground for her experiments in self-representation. Showing that her experiences of pleasure, pain, and illness are more than a solitary confrontation with her own mortality, Ernaux challenges depersonalized medical narrative of her body's vulnerability by imagining her physical self outside of binary configurations of health and sickness. Even as autobiographical portrayals of her diagnosis with cancer and sexual desire entail an unsurprising emphasis on singular body, then, they do so in such a way that prevents familiar categorizations of individual and collective identity. In so doing, she makes a compelling claim for physical sensations as proof of individuality and self-understanding, while testing limits of autobiographical writing as a resource of communal knowledge about living with pain. As recent volume Textual and Visual Selves; Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography (2011) suggests, Ernaux's inclusion of images in L'Usage coincides with an increasing prevalence of hybrid autobiographical narratives within French literary production. Although some essays revisit well-trodden notions of multiple or fractured selves in women's autobiography, they also effectively highlight a feminist use of visual narratives for navigating gendered spaces of public and private and prohibitions on self-disclosure genre invokes. As such, they point to a feminist topography committed to dismantling sociocultural and political underpinnings of public and private spheres through acts of testimony. Many critical readings of L'Usage have convincingly argued how photography represents Ernaux's confrontation with death and will to survive a life-threatening disease within such discourses of public and private. (4) Her deployment of image and word certainly displaces boundaries of individual and social life without obscuring what Shirley Jordan identifies as the connection between women and intimacy and social proscriptions and taboos that have traditionally regulated women's association with private sphere (Chronicles of Intimacy 73). …

Annie Ernaux: de la perte au corps glorieux by Michèle Bacholle-Bošković

Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Bacholle-Bošković, Michèle. Annie Ernaux: de la perte au corps glorieux. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7535-1707-3. Pp. 175. 15 a. The brusque opening of this book—“Toutes les images demeureront” (9), followed by a list of cryptic phrases and fragments—represents an appropriate test for potential readers: anyone who does not recognize the play on the incipit of Les années or catch the allusions to different works by Ernaux is probably not going to be able to appreciate this rapidly moving treatment of her oeuvre. The uncontroversial foundation of Bacholle-Bošković’s argument is that a pervasive sense of loss, whether real or symbolic, has always driven Ernaux to write, as the latter has acknowledged on a number of occasions. Among the more important instances that Bacholle-Bošković examines are Ernaux’s discovery, at age ten, that she was in effect an “enfant de remplacement” (38) for an older sister who had died; her decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy at a time when abortion was still illegal in France; and the wrenching experience of losing, to Alzheimer’s, the mother with whom she had such a complex relationship. Hence the understandable desire, on Ernaux’s part, to preserve traces of the past, notably by incorporating descriptions of personal photographs into her writing, and the fascination with‘taches’ of various sorts that is apparent in many of her works. More problematic, however, is Bacholle-Bošković’s eventual conclusion, previewed early on: “C’est en écrivant contre [...] ces pertes [...] qu’Ernaux a produit une œuvre double, ancrée dans le passé mais porteuse du futur, une œuvre de ce qui a été et de ce qui sera, progressant de la perte au corps glorieux”(12).What exactly we are to understand by the notion of “corps glorieux”remains unclear, particularly since the final part of this study, in support of that contention, is relatively short, visibly hurried, and difficult to follow, as Bacholle-Bošković returns at times to material touched on earlier and slips rapidly from point to point, moving quickly to broad assertions. After citing a remark by Ernaux that she has felt at times something of a ‘mission’in writing, Bacholle-Bošković concludes in abrupt fashion:“Messianique est ainsi l’œuvre ernalienne. Alors prenons et lisons-la tous, car ceci est son corps, sa vie, offerts pour nous” (169). To her credit, Bacholle-Bošković is intimately familiar with Ernaux’s extensive oeuvre, as well as the numerous interviews the author has given, and at times her readings are certainly thought-provoking. There are interesting musings, for example, on the significance of Ernaux’s full given name,“Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux, née Duchesne”(19), on the impact of the characteristic blancs that punctuate her writing (55–56), on her drive to“laisser sa trace”(119), or on the resonances of the title of her masterwork, Les années (166). Anyone who has followed Ernaux’s body of work will naturally be interested in this book (which includes a certain measure of 252 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 253 previously published material), even if the presentation remains on the whole more impressionistic than entirely convincing. University of Kansas John T. Booker Baetens, Jan, et Alexander Streitberger. De l’autoportrait à l’autobiographie. Caen: Minard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-256-91166-8. Pp. 263. 28 a. This attractive publication’s back cover states:“les études réunies dans ce volume collectif traitent de la façon dont la photographie peut s’allier aux mots pour retracer un vécu personnel.” This description is an indispensable complement to the work’s title because it underscores the importance of photographs throughout the collective volume. Indeed, the “self-portrait” of the title is meant to point toward one of the oldest genres of photography, according to the well-written introduction by the coeditors . This is not the only recent publication to focus on the interplay of photographs and words in works containing autobiographical elements, but it is one of the best, thanks to its balance; while the chapters deal with...

Narrations d'un nouveau siecle: romans et recits francais (2001-2010)

This collective volume, the proceedings of a 2011 Colloque de Cerisy, joins the growing number of academic studies devoted to twenty-first-century literature. It sets itself apart through its ambition to survey the century's opening decade in all its diversity, tracing preoccupations and trends where they are present (but taking care not to distort or homogenize the period with a sweeping thesis of what the decade is all about), as well as through the calibre of its contributors and the quality of their interventions, as we have come to expect from a Cerisy publication. French critics are outnumbered by those from other countries, including Germany and the UK, with half the chapters written by academics based in North America, which testifies to the broad international scholarly interest in contemporary French fiction, or perhaps to the traditionalism of literary studies in France itself. An introduction by the editors and an opening survey-chapter from Anne Roche attempt to sketch in some general themes: the French literature of the century's first decade is seen as existing in an ever more culturally diverse environment, both through cultural globalization and the explosion in visual and text-based media; Roche discerns in recent novels a new questioning of their relationship to literature of the past and to the novel as a genre, as well as a foregrounding of the real, historical, and personal (and, in several cases, both). The chapters that follow very much bear out her analysis. Among established authors, Annie Ernaux is the most frequently referenced in the later chapters: her Les Années (2008) is without doubt one of the most significant works of the decade, and also, in its melding of autobiography and social history, at the nexus of many of the concerns of other contemporary writers. Other writers building on a strong twentieth-century presence include Pascal Quignard, Pierre Bergounioux, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Christine Angot, Camille Laurens, and Michel Houellebecq, but the emphasis is firmly on new and less familiar names. Yannick Haenel, Laurent Mauvignier, and Chloé Delaume appear in several chapters, while an entire essay is devoted to each of Philippe Forest, Pierre Senges, Pierre Bayard, Anne Garréta, Yves Ravey, and Éric Laurrent. Algerian and other francophone writing is explored in chapters dealing with Nina Bouraoui, Leïla Sebbar, François Cheng, Nancy Huston, and Agota Kristof, among others. The absences are also interesting: François Bon, who received much attention in the middle of the decade, is barely mentioned, and Jean Echenoz is similarly elusive. Women writers are perhaps underrepresented, with no discussion of Marie NDiaye or Marie Darrieussecq and little on Amélie Nothomb. The volume is also deliberately high-culture in its remit, with no room for Muriel Barbery, Nicolas Fargues, or David Foenkinos, let alone Fred Vargas, Marc Levy, or Guillaume Musso. These last omissions are regrettable: it is hard to grasp the shape of a decade of fiction while paying so little attention to the novels actually being read. But where the collection succeeds, particularly in its analyses of the decade's new writers of great promise, it does so admirably.

Writing as Flat as a Photograph: Subjectivity in Annie Ernaux's La Place

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes All Annie Ernaux excerpts from A Man's Place, translated by Tanya Leslie. Copyright © 1983 ——— . La Place . Paris : Folio Gallimard , 1983 . Print. [Google Scholar] by Editions Gallimard. Translation copyright © 1992 by Seven Stories Press. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Seven Stories Press, www.sevenstories.com. Excerpts from CAMERA LUCIDA: REFLECTIONS ON PHOTOGRAPHY by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard. Translation copyright © 1981 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJennifer Anderson BlissJennifer Anderson Bliss is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation is entitled Picturing the Unspeakable: Trauma, Memory, and Visuality in American and Franco-Belgian Graphic Novels.

French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story by Simon Kemp (review)

Simon Kemp, French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. 213 pp. Since the late 198os, criticism of contemporary French literature has been preoccupied by a perceived shift of emphasis in literary fiction. Novelists are no longer predominantly concerned with textual experiment, but rather are prioritizing the traditional concerns of literature: storytelling, subjectivity, character, coherent plotting. The term retour au is used to refer to this development. In the introduction to this persuasive and engaging study, Simon Kemp traces the history of the use of this term: his adroit synthesis draws on material from the mainstream and intellectual presses as well as from academic criticism. The introduction poses the questions which the term implies: What exactly is this recit that we are returning to? Where are we returning from? (2). The introduction, answering the latter question, provides a deft summary of the various versions of formalism that held sway in twentieth-century literary fiction: Gidian self-consciousness, Surrealism, the nouveau roman, Oulipian constraint, and the extremes of Tel Quelian transgression. It was in the 1970s, Kemp argues, that this experimentalism reached its high water mark as it coincided with the apogee of theory as a cultural force in the humanities (8-9). Though experimentalism has since been on the ebb, Kemp argues that contemporary fiction is nonetheless strongly marked by mid-twenteith-century formalism. His analyses of the work of Annie Ernaux, Pascal Qui*gnard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz, and Patrick Modiano in the five chapters of this study persuasively demonstrate how, in each case, the retour au practiced by these authors is accompanied by an innovative use of narrative form. These innovations are only possible in the wake of the experimenters' pugnacious explorations of new avenues in fiction. But the central interest of the new generation, in contradistinction to that of their predecessors, is to use these innovations to write the adventure, rather than to prioritize the metatextual concerns of the adventure of writing. Kemp's analyses of his chosen authors are compelling. Skillful close readings are in each case accompanied by an account of developments in the author's career to date, and a judicious use of narrative theories. Throughout the study, Kemp draws on a range of currents in narratology, from Barthes to Brooks and Genette to Hillis Miller, applying snippets of theoretical concepts lightly but sure-footedly. His readings are thus both theoretically and thematically instructive. The first chapter, on Annie Ernaux's of employs terms used by Genette in Discours du recit. Kemp argues that Ernaux uses the of (the temporal point which the narrative is being constructed) as a means of exploring the qualities of time in remembered experience. There is a very interesting account here of Ernaux's hostility to fabulation and to any representation of herself as a writer in her work. Kemp shows that the objective and analytical goals of Ernaux's autofiction dictate its occlusion of her own career as a published author: writerly contamination of the experience as the protagonist is experiencing it would damage its validity as 'evidence' (46). Ernaux fails to achieve her ideal of documentary objectivity in her work, but Kemp concludes that this failure is to our benefit as readers, as her problematization of narrating and narrated time provides a rich account of the contradictions of the self and of memory. The shape-shifting work of Pascal Qui * gnard, located at the fringes of narrative, is examined in Chapter Two. There is a nuanced analysis of how Qui*gnard's aesthetic of fragmentation is subtended by a concern with linkage, coherence and rationality. …

Love Hotel

Eric Hayot On Literary Worlds Oxford University Press In a work of particular relevance to WLT, Hayot puts forth his argument for the redefinition of modern literary history. He dissects the division of literature into bordered “worlds,” circumscribed by lines of culture, style, and authorship. This study of global literary aesthetics incorporates politics, philosophy, and pop culture to propose a paradigm shift in literary thought. July–August 2013 • 63 Annie Ernaux A Man’s Place Tanya Leslie, tr. Seven Stories Press Ernaux’s brief autobiography appeals to familial sentiment and poignant nostalgia as its author explores her changing relationship with her father. She follows his evolution from peasant to shopkeeper and the pitfalls of status, education, and language that accompany his supposed growth. This edition includes an enlightening introduction by Francine Prose. Nota Bene Christine Montalbetti. Love Hotel. Paris. P.O.L. 2013. isbn 9782818017852 The narrator of Christine Montalbetti ’s latest novel is a French writer who has decided to spend a few months in Kyoto in order to work on a book, an “uncertain novel” he can only imagine, for the moment at least, in rough profile. Two or three times a week, he meets Natsumi in the Love Hotel, a windowless, neutral site whose abstraction from the world that surrounds it constitutes much of its charm. Natsumi is curiously passive and mute in the early pages, but when she begins to speak it becomes clear that she’s a gifted storyteller, much like Scheherazade. The tales that she tells are mostly ones she had heard as a child, from her father, for instance, or from her grandmother. The stories are dynamic and mutable; they come in multiple variants and new versions. Never less than fantastic, they never fail to fascinate the narrator. The Love Hotel is an ideal setting for tales such as these because it is conceived to facilitate fantasy of all kinds. Spirits, ghosts, and specters inhabit it, just as they inhabit the stories that Natsumi tells. Some of those spirits have names—Akanamé, Nura, Makuragaeshi—while others are anonymous. Some of them are beneficent ; others are dreamers, dancers, or tricksters. Some of them are amusing ; others exert “all the tyrannies of which ghosts are capable.” Whether Natsumi herself belongs to their ranks is an open question; what is abundantly clear is that in her presence, the narrator plunges into a world of fable. He comes to understand writing (in one of its dimensions at least) as a cocoon that one weaves around oneself , something that isolates the subject as efficiently as any of the rooms in the Love Hotel. Yet he is not quite sure whether the Love Hotel is a sanctuary or a prison, nor whether Natsumi is his muse or his jailor. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because people tell stories quite regardless of circumstance —even on March 11, 2011, the day toward which this novel points, a day that began peacefully enough but ended in the Fukushima disaster. Warren Motte University of Colorado Marie NDiaye. Ladivine. Paris. Gallimard. 2013. isbn 9782070126699 Marie NDiaye’s new novel, with perhaps the most complex plot of any of her works, tells a story of four generations , taking place over more than fifty years. The novel begins from the perspective of Clarisse Rivière, whose life has been shaped by her refusal to admit to those she knows, especially Richard, her husband, and Ladivine, her daughter, that her mother, Ladivine Sylla, is a poor black seamstress. She has taken the name Clarisse to sound more bourgeois, but to her mother, whom she visits secretly, she will always be Malinka. After twenty -five years, her husband leaves her. The perspective changes to that of the daughter, who occasionally sees her mother. After Clarisse has been brutally murdered by a lover she has accepted into her house and even introduced to her own mother, her daughter tries to understand what has happened. Ladivine feels she is being watched by a brown dog, with whom she identifies, and into whom she presumably turns. ...

Life, Disrupted: Annie Ernaux's Journal du dehors and "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit"

Diary writing is often something that happens when the narratives by which we live break down. From 1985 until April 1986, while her mother was dying of Alzheimer's disease, Annie Ernaux kept not one journal, but two: Journal du dehors (1993) and the journal des visites, published as Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (1997). While it might seem that this double diary practice enabled Ernaux to separate her inner concerns from her more public daily life, the fact that Journal du dehors draws simultaneously on several different generic conventions, among which are both the journal intime and the ethnographic log, and that Ernaux publishes the journal des visites as Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit undermines any attempt to account for this double diary keeping in terms of a private/public or personal/collective dichotomy. This article focuses on the work that is performed by this doubling of Ernaux's journal space. It argues that Journal du dehors is not merely the effect of disruption, but more specific...

Working-Class Whiteness from within and Without: An Auto-Ethnographic Response to Avtar Bran's ‘The Scent of Memory’

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997.

In Defense of Books: Literature, Publishing, and Reading in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French

In Defense of Books: Literature, Publishing, and Reading in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Gill Rye (bio) At the beginning of the twenty-first century, France, in common with many other nations, is caught up in economic crisis, high unemployment, the erosion of working conditions and of personal liberty, as well as in the contradictory effects of a new Europe, globalization, and the technological revolution. The world of literature is not immune to these factors, of course. Independent publishers are being taken over by major publishing houses; small bookshops are losing out to large chains; the materiality of books is being challenged by the ease of access to, and mobility of, digitization, of e-books and downloads; and the reading public is changing. This article identifies and explores what is potentially an emerging trend in recent women’s writing in France, in which a group of authors are responding to these challenges and transformations in publishing. The analysis focuses on Lydie Salvayre’s BW (2009), Isabelle Desesquelles’s Fahrenheit 2010 (2010), and Blandine Le Callet’s La Ballade de Lila K (2010), making reference also, in the conclusion, to Chloé Delaume’s Dans ma maison sous terre (2009).1 These works amount to a defense of literature, books, and reading. If much women’s writing over recent decades is intertextual, bearing witness to the author’s own reading (for example, the work of Hélène Cixous, Camille Laurens, Christine Angot, Anne Garréta), and if many texts incorporate writers and writing (the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Annie Ernaux, Cixous, Angot, and Amélie Nothomb, to name just a few), my corpus here engages, rather, with the relationships between publishing and literature, and between books and readers. In the tradition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century these contemporary French female authors appear to be warning of attacks on literature as we know it, and defending it against a modern and globalized world that is threatening its [End Page 298] future. Their texts critique changes in publishing and bookselling, and address the proliferation of e-publishing and e-readers. The aim of the article is to investigate what is at stake in these accounts. Do they simply privilege books over digital media? Are they defending literature against modern publishing procedures and marketing or popular culture and the rise of visual and new media? Is this new current simply steeped in nostalgia for the traditional and the refusal of progress, the modern, and the new? And what value do these texts give literature and its role in society? Finally, where does this scenario leave “les femmes et la lecture?” In engaging with these questions, I consider how these authors and texts intervene into current debates on literature in the twenty-first century, what points they are making and what strategies and literary techniques they use to do so. Before addressing each text in turn, I first outline the key debates to which they are responding. French literature suffers from perennial crises, or so it would seem from the ongoing discourse of crisis in French letters, and especially in relation to the novel.2 The second millennium is no different. Laurent Dandrieu, for example, considers literature as a “vecteur de civilisation,” and relates crises in literature to those in society. His perspective is that contemporary literature is in crisis for several reasons: (i) contemporary media and the dominance of audiovisual culture encourages mediocrity; (ii) publishing has become an industry and is run by bankers rather than literary specialists; (iii) small publishers, who support interesting and demanding work, are in decline; (iv) it is increasingly difficult for authors to live from their writing and they now have to fit it around paid employment; and (v) fewer readers can appreciate complex literary works and so the demand for quality literature is waning. His negative view of the state of French literature is symptomatic of nothing less than “une crise globale, une crise de la société y compris de la société politique, une crise spirituelle, une crise...