Event overview
The Auto / Bio / Fiction series of talks and seminars resumes after the Christmas break with a focus on Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux
Guido Mazzoni (University of Siena), "Like everyone else. Annie Ernaux's The Years"
In this talk I will discuss Annie Ernaux’s The Years (Les Années, 2008), a text for which Ernaux invented a new way of understanding autobiography by mixing personal history and collective history, speaking impersonally or in the first person plural, and reinventing the use of tenses.
The Years is both a collective historical novel and Ernaux's personal search of lost time: “a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life [...]: a sort of impersonal autobiography", as we read in the last pages of the book.
Carole Sweeney (Goldsmiths), "Writing feminist philosophy: Annie Ernaux and Simone de Beauvoir"
Observing how Simone de Beauvoir made it possible for philosophy to engage with women’s lives, Toril Moi has noted: ‘ Beauvoir indicates that she thinks of the ordinary and the everyday as integral to her philosophical project of analyzing women’s situation.’
Using what she regards as the seductive ‘snare’ of domesticity as a way of examining the ways in which being a housewife and mother vitiated, amongst other things, women’s potential for intellectual or philosophical contemplation, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex examined how domesticity (especially in the post-war French context) is fundamentally inimical to women’s transcendence. Recognising the profound influence that The Second Sex and the subsequent novels had on her own life and writing, Annie Ernaux has written of the ‘running threads’ that link her work to de Beauvoir’s.
However, while Ernaux greatly admired The Second Sex’s rigorous demythologisation of women’s lives, she wrote in her diary of de Beauvoir’s novels that ‘… I will never write like this’. While both writers share a similar commitment to the objectives of littérature engagée, Ernaux thought that de Beauvoir showed an ‘indifference to writing as subject’, whereas she believes that ‘how to write’ is inseparable from ‘what to write.’
I suggest here that Ernaux’s work continues to examine de Beauvoir’s conviction that feminist philosophy can arise from attention to women’s ‘living realities’, thus enlarging the possibility of locating transcendence in the ‘ordinary and the everyday’. I will also discuss how Ernaux’s use of auto-fiction (a label she dislikes), the agility of the ‘transpersonal I’ and l'écriture plate, work to avoid the instrumentalisation of philosophy in fiction that she identified (although more recently retracted) in some of de Beauvoir’s novels.
Attendance is free but booking is required to receive a link to attend.
More information on the speakers and the event
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Jan 2024 | 5:30pm - 7:45pm |
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