Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This critical study focuses on Annie Ernaux’s writing trajectory. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutic, the text engages in a series of provocative close readings of Ernaux’s works in a move to highlight the contradictions and nuances in her writing, and to demonstrate the interlectual intricacies of her literary project. By so doing, it seeks to introduce new readers to Ernaux’s works, while engaging on less familiar terrain those already introduced to her writing. Ernaux’s writing is informed by a variety of contemporary concerns, including the catagorization of genre and it’s fluid manifestations in the realm of autobiography; the subject position articulated by minority groups and the role played by language in identity formation; and the naturalization and consquent deconstruction of class and gender ideologies. The work focuses on the textual manifestations of these concerns, and provides both a general overview of Ernaux’s work and an analysis of each text’s specific thematic and narrative examples.