Read complete books and articles on:

At Questia, we offer:

Exclusive access to more than 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles.
Trusted resources from leading publishers.
Time saving tools to do better, faster research!

10 of the Best Books and Articles on:

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience » Read Now
by Lyn Thomas. 202 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The award-winning novels of Annie Ernaux are controversial, innovative, and address the topical issues of gender and social class. Surprisingly, there has been no major study of her work, despite the fact that it is increasingly taught and has been widely translated. This book fills that gap by...
Read More

The award-winning novels of Annie Ernaux are controversial, innovative, and address the topical issues of gender and social class. Surprisingly, there has been no major study of her work, despite the fact that it is increasingly taught and has been widely translated. This book fills that gap by presenting Ernaux's work through a range of readings: those of the author herself, those of academics, of reviewers and of 'ordinary' readers. Ernaux's own curiosity about the relationship between writing and the reality she is describing leads her to adopt a self-reflective approach to the narration of her life experience. This stimulating introduction to her work reflects both on the relationship between writing and identity in general terms, and specifically on the process of writing literary criticism. In the final chapter the impersonal register of academic writing is extended by a more personal dialogue with Ernaux's texts. What emerges is a new critical method that explores the multiple relationships between readers and texts.The first work in English on Annie Ernaux, this book goes far beyond traditional analyses to address the fundamental question of critical writing and to present a new methodology for the study of literary texts. It is thus essential reading for those interested in French literature, critical theory, gender and cultural studies.
Show less
2.

Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins » Read Now
by Siobhan McIlvanney. 239 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In this first critical study in English to focus exclusively on Annie Ernaux’s writing trajectory, Siobhaacute;n McIlvanney provides a stimulating and challenging analysis of Ernaux’s individual texts. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutic, this study engages in a series of...
Read More

In this first critical study in English to focus exclusively on Annie Ernaux’s writing trajectory, Siobhaacute;n McIlvanney provides a stimulating and challenging analysis of Ernaux’s individual texts. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutic, this study 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 intellectual 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 familiar with her writing.
Show less
3.

Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (Chap. 4 "Annie Ernaux's Understatement") » Read Now
by Warren Motte. 213 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Small Worlds examines the minimalist trend in French writing, from the early 1980s to the present. Warren Motte first considers the practice of minimalist in other media, such as the plastic arts and music, and then proposes a theoretical model of minimalist literature. Subsequent chapters are...
Read More

Small Worlds examines the minimalist trend in French writing, from the early 1980s to the present. Warren Motte first considers the practice of minimalist in other media, such as the plastic arts and music, and then proposes a theoretical model of minimalist literature. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the work of a variety of contemporary French writers and a diversity of literary genres.
In his discussion of minimalism, Motte considers smallness and simplicity, a reduction of means (and the resulting amplification of effect), immediacy, directness, clarity, repetition, symmetry, and playfulness. He argues that economy of expression offers writers a way of renovating traditional literary forms and allows them to represent human experience more directly.
Motte provides close readings of novels by distinguished contemporary French writers, including Edmond Jabes, Annie Ernaux, Herve Guibert, Marie Redonnet, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Targowla, and Emmanuele Bernheim, demonstrating that however diverse their,work may otherwise be, they have all exploited the principle of formal economy in their writing.
Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (Nebraska 1995) is his most recent book.
Show less
4.

Female Journeys: Autobiographical Expressions by French and Italian Women (Chap. 8 "Annie Ernaux's Auto/Biographies: Unfinished Stories?") » Read Now
by Claire Marrone. 190 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In this study of 19th- and 20th-century French and Italian women's autobiography, the author illustrates how the protagonists' development unfolds through separation from oppressive social and familial structures. Reading the selected life stories as bildungsromane and drawing on an array of both...
Read More

In this study of 19th- and 20th-century French and Italian women's autobiography, the author illustrates how the protagonists' development unfolds through separation from oppressive social and familial structures. Reading the selected life stories as bildungsromane and drawing on an array of both canonical and noncanonical texts in the various autobiographical subgenres, Marrone concludes that the heroines' movements away from oppressive structures are not limited to particular historical periods but are motivated by historical and cultural circumstances. She thoughtfully traces the reasons why a 19th-century protagonist might leave her country, a turn-of-the-century heroine might flee her family, and a modern female character might separate from her mother, carefully examining their motivations and their goals. In telling their stories, she concludes, women writers continually challenge existing autobiographical conventions. Marrone finds that postmodern texts prove that the journey toward selfhood may be an ongoing one, one that unfolds through the creation of multiple life stories.
Show less
5.

Challenging Autobiography: Lost Object and Aesthetic Object in Ernaux's 'Une Femme,' in Journal of European Studies » Read Now
by M.A. Hutton. 14 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

Untangling the Trauma Knot: Autoethnography and Annie Ernaux's Shame, in Mosaic (Winnipeg) » Read Now
by Janet Mason Ellerby. 17 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

Annie Ernaux's Shameful Narration, in French Forum » Read Now
by Jennifer Willging. 21 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

Women on Women and the Middle Man: Narrative Structures in Duras and Ernaux, in French Forum » Read Now
by Susan Marson. 16 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
9.

Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death (Discussion of Ernaux's A Woman's Story begins on p. 78) » Read Now
by Nancy K. Miller. 196 pgs.

Collections: Psychology, Entire Library

"My mother's death was a shock--an athletic non-smoker, she was diagnosed as having lung cancer days after her sixty-eighth birthday and died a few months later. It was only in the years following her death, when my father became physically and mentally crippled by Parkinson's disease, that I began...
Read More

"My mother's death was a shock--an athletic non-smoker, she was diagnosed as having lung cancer days after her sixty-eighth birthday and died a few months later. It was only in the years following her death, when my father became physically and mentally crippled by Parkinson's disease, that I began to think and to write about the end of life." So notes Nancy K. Miller in the opening pages of Bequest and Betrayal, an innovative form of memoir that blends astute literary criticism and gripping autobiographical passages as it illuminates an experience that is both universal and intensely private: the death of a parent. Bequest and Betrayal is composed like a tapestry, weaving together insightful readings of books like Philip Roth's Patrimony with harrowing autobiographical material about the last years of Miller's own parents. By incorporating her own deeply felt memories into the text, the author gives weight to her examination of the central themes that emerge: the relations between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters; the crisis of aging and of bodies in decline; what it means to write about someone else's suffering; how questions of class and religion shape the relationship between parent and child. With great sensitivity, she shows how the adult child--confronted with the loss of parents--comes to terms through autobiographical narrative. To do this, Miller examines a series of autobiographical works in which a parent's death is central to the family plot, including Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark, and Art Spiegelman's Maus. Telling the story of a parent's death, Miller demonstrates, is a way of rewriting one's own sense of history, one's present self in relation to childhood. Whether she is shedding light on the memoirs of other contemporary writers or relating a detail of her father's struggle with Parkinson's disease, Miller captivates us with her fearless, original intelligence. Combining Miller's broad knowledge of literature, her wry sensibility, and engaging prose style, Bequest and Betrayal is a book of outstanding grace and complexity, highly readable and often very moving.
Show less
10.

But Enough about Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives (Discussion of Annie Ernaux begins on p. 112) » Read Now
by Nancy K. Miller. 145 pgs.

Collections: History, Literature, Entire Library

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to...
Read More

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.
Show less