Pour une lecture critique de Les Années d’Annie Ernaux

• Authors: Pontolillo Giovanni

Title variants

EN

ANNIE ERNAUX’S THE YEARS. A CRITICAL READING

• Languages of publication: FR

Abstracts

EN

This essay deals with the problem of the “End of Art” through a critical reading of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008). The analysis of two physiognomic aspects of the book — the white space and the list — reveals some critical points of Ernaux’s poetic of distance: the conflict between the material side and the sensitive side of memory; the rejection of rhetorical invention (inventio) as creation and self-expression; and the attempt to overcome the limits of traditional autobiographical writing. Against the dominant attitude in scholarship, which has mainly focus on the authors Ernaux quotes in the book, I explore other possible connections, through a non-continuistic model of temporality. The problem of the “End of Art” is finally reversed in the specular and complementary problem of the crisis of criticism, on which I focus in the final remarks, by advancing a proposal for another relationship between criticism and common sense.

Keywords

FR

Annie Ernaux; Les Années; image; mémoire; crise de la critique

EN

Annie Ernaux;; The Years; Picture; Memory; Crisis of Criticism

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Svět literatury – Časopis pro novodobé literatury (World of Literature – Journal for Modern Literatures)
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 32
• Issue: Special Issue
• Pages: 216-227

Contributors

author

Pontolillo Giovanni

• l’Université de Pise /
• Université Jean Monnet