Online Taster Course: ‘Annie Ernaux : L’autobiographie impersonnelle’

Join the University of London Institute in Paris for their online French Studies taster course entitled ‘Annie Ernaux: L’autobiographie impersonnelle’ with Dr Joanne Brueton.

This lecture explores the Nobel Prize winning French author, Annie Ernaux (1940–), and offers a theorisation of her impersonal and ethnographic literary style.

On 6th October 2022, the prodigious French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature. Raised in a working-class background in Normandy, her writing dissects intimate bodily experiences and refracts these through the social politics of class and gender.

This lecture will discuss Ernaux’s masterpiece, Les Années (2008), in which Ernaux remembers her own confrontations with abortion rights, the struggle for female emancipation, and the alienation of the intellectual elite in 20th-century France. We study how Ernaux reinvents the autobiographical genre through the use of transpersonal, collective memories, asking how the individual is inflected and produced by the stories of the many.

This will be a 30-minute lecture delivered in English and will be followed by a 30-minute live Q&A session where you will be able to ask any questions you may have about the University of London Institute in Paris' French Studies programmes.