Autobiografia Literatura Kultura Media

Annie Ernaux perceives writing as a strategic opportunity to intervene in the social tissue. Her autosociobiographic project never focuses excessively on the self. It evolves towards a reciprocal gift, which the writer pragmatically uses, explicitly identifying the social, class and gender frameworks that shape the individual’s life. In her opinion, literature never remains neutral, writing about the individual and intimate is political. The possibility of recover experienced inequalities is the primary question of Ernaux’s literary reflection. The formal research evolves and divide the writer’s work into several stages: from the consciously political and confrontational novel Les armoires vides, written against cultural and economic domination, through the écriture plate (today she prefers the term écriture factuelle or écriture transparente), which does not stop at the narrator’s feelings, removes the “screen” between him and the presented reality, to writing the present – ethnotext. Ernaux’s contribution to capturing the zeitgeist is original basically because she embraces the uncertainty and complexity of the present without pessimism. Torn between beeing an ethnologist and a writer, she is aware of the limitations and insufficiency of each of these discourses. However, the attitude of the ethnologist appear to prevail, as it seems to reflect with greater precision the transience, but also the power of everyday life. For Ernaux, writing becomes a transubstantiation, a transformation of one’s own experiences into something existing outside the subject, immaterial but understandable and useful to others.