Annie Ernaux

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The earliest known literary productions by women living in Europe were probably by French writers. French women have contributed enormously to world literature for centuries, but only a few have been judged worthy of recognition by mostly male critics. As part of the feminist move to reclaim women writers and to rethink literary history, scholars have given growing amounts of attention to French women writers and their substantial contribution. This reference book provides extensive information about French women writers and the world in which they lived. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for authors, genres, literary movements, institutions, events, and organizations related to French literature. Each entry summarizes feminist thought on the topic, and provides bibliographical information. The volume begins with a feminist history of French literature and concludes with a selected bibliography and a chronological list of French women writers.