Ernaux vue par les écrivain.e.s transfuges et/ou féministes : littérature et insoumission

Abstract

Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux is a celebrated writer, but she is also seen as a representative of the dominated within society, with all the ambiguities that the term ‘representative’ entails. While reception of her work remains contested in France, it has to be said that the personal and political agenda that has partly guided Ernaux's work - ‘to avenge my kind and to avenge my gender’ - is part of a political conception of literature that can take on a prescriptive or incitive value for writers who are class migrants and/or feminists. Through their critical comments, these writers influence Ernaux's way the work is read - by the author as well as by lay readers - granting social usefulness to the aesthetic ‘transgression’ usually attributed to her prose.