Annie Ernaux Criticism
Annie Ernaux stands as a distinguished figure in contemporary French literature, renowned for her seamless integration of autobiography, memoir, and fiction. Her narratives, often drawn from her own experiences within a working-class family in Normandy, explore themes of familial relationships, class struggle, and social dynamics in post-World War II France. This intricate weaving of personal and societal commentary is evident in early works like Les armoires vides (Cleaned Out), as detailed by Loraine Day, showcasing a style that deftly challenges conventional genre boundaries.
Critics have lauded Ernaux's ability to confront difficult emotions, particularly in works such as La honte (Shame), where she investigates the ramifications of domestic violence on her identity during adolescence. This examination is enriched by the insights of Lawrence D. Kritzman and Nancy K. Miller. Her introspective narratives further unfold in L'événement (Happening), which addresses intimate and controversial aspects of her life.
Ernaux's works often blur the lines between reality and narrative, employing literary techniques that enhance the emotional depth of her storytelling. This approach, while sometimes critiqued for perceived narrative disorganization, as noted by Victoria Jenkins and Linda Barrett Osborne, is celebrated for its vivid imagery and profound psychological insights, particularly in works like Journal du dehors and Se perdre.
Her notable works, such as Les armoires vides and A Frozen Woman, delve into the conflicts of personal identity against traditional female roles, while A Man's Place and A Woman's Story offer compelling portrayals of her parents' lives. These narratives explore themes of social mobility and cultural dislocation, as reviewed by Dominic Di Bernardi and Jessica Neely. Moreover, Passion simple (Simple Passion) stirred controversy in France due to its candid exploration of desire.
Ernaux's literary contributions have been recognized through numerous accolades, including the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place. Her books, such as A Woman's Story and A Man's Place, have been acknowledged by The New York Times as significant works that provide insightful perspectives on the French middle class and women's rights, further elaborated in reviews by Jessica Neely and Loraine Day. Ernaux's narratives have earned a place as "contemporary classics," resonating with readers globally through their rich exploration of personal and social themes.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Ernaux, Annie (Vol. 88)
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A review of La Place and Une Femme
(summary)
In the review below, Di Bernardi offers a laudatory assessment of A Woman's Story and A Man's Place, praising Ernaux's focus on class, guilt, identity, and personal history in these works.
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Cleaned Out
(summary)
In the following excerpt, which was taken from the translator's afterword to the English-language version of Les armoires vides, Sanders provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Cleaned Out, briefly examining Ernaux's aims and discussing the volume's themes, style, and place within the context of her other works.
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Class, Sexuality, and Subjectivity in Annie Ernaux's Les Armoires vides
(summary)
In the essay below, Day examines Ernaux's treatment of social stature, sexuality, feminine subjectivity, women's rights, and personal identity in Cleaned Out.
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A Life Cut Short
(summary)
In the following favorable assessment, Caldwell offers a thematic discussion of Cleaned Out, noting Ernaux's emphasis on loss and alienation.
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Upwardly Mobile Norman
(summary)
Here, Fortune lauds Ernaux's ability to evoke French experiences and an intimate portrait of family life for a universal audience in A Man's Place, which was published in England as Positions. This exceptionally small book Positions is not only a moving personal memorial, but also one of much wider resonance. Annie Ernaux is writing about the life of her working-class father, who came of Normandy peasant stock; and at the same time to a lesser degree—because her focus is on him—recalls her own estrangement from him as a middle-class convent-school education took her to university, and teaching, and a middle-class marriage. She charts, in brilliant, bleached detail, a specifically French experience, though one which can be universally acknowledged.
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'When Mother Became History'
(summary)
In the review below, Danto discusses thematic aspects of A Woman's Story, lauding the volume's originality and tender portrait of Ernaux's mother.
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Divided by Language
(summary)
In the following review of Cleaned Out and A Woman's Story, Neely notes Ernaux's focus on language, literacy, alienation, and class.
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A Woman's Story
(summary)
In the following, Shoaf offers praise for A Woman's Story, classifying the volume as a "fictional memoir."
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A Woman's Story
(summary)
In the review below, Laurence praises the narrative structure and stylistic features of A Woman's Story.
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Leaving Father Behind
(summary)
In the following, she favorably reviews A Man's Place, lauding it as an "exorcism of remembrance" devoid of artifice.
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A Man's Place
(summary)
In the following laudatory review, Laurence discusses stylistic aspects of A Man's Place, highlighting Ernaux's exploration of her dual identities and the impact of her working-class background on her writing.
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Theory of Relativity
(summary)
Levine lauds Ernaux's focus on language, class, and familial relationships in A Man's Place, describing the class mobility of a family's first educated child as a story of hope and betrayal, pride and uneasy rivalry, and often filial guilt. Ernaux's narrative-splintering self-interrogations solidify the reader's trust, making A Man's Place a work of ruthless authenticity.
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A review of Passion simple
(summary)
In the following, she provides a favorable assessment of Passion simple, describing it as a detailed account of the feelings, sensations, and thoughts a woman experiences as she awaits her lover's call or visit. Unlike Marguerite Duras, whose prose is imagistic and haunting, Annie Ernaux's style is straightforward and classical, focusing on the harsh realities of passion.
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Cleaned Out
(summary)
In the following review, she discusses Cleaned Out as a book about the "culturally disenfranchised." Annie Ernaux's novel Cleaned Out is more than a powerful evocation of the class system in France in the 1950s and of one woman's struggle to move up in the class hierarchy and forget her past. It is also a novel that serves as a haunting contribution, both in subject matter and literary form, to the project of the culturally disenfranchised speaking in their own voice.
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Simple Passion
(summary)
In the following review, Hoffert comments on the narrative structure and popular appeal of Simple Passion. The narrator details her passion for a married man, focusing on the story of passionate waiting and how her attachment colors everything in her life. The book caused a sensation in France, with many parents refusing to let their children read it, likely due to its coolly clinical approach that deglamorizes the mystery of love.
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Who Can Explain It? Who Can Tell You Why?
(summary)
In the following, she praises Ernaux's examination of obsession and emotion in Simple Passion, but laments her use of and focus on self-conscious language.
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Eros Redux
(summary)
In the essay below, in which she offers a laudatory assessment of Simple Passion, Merkin addresses the popularity of the volume in France, discussing its status and uniqueness as an example of erotic literature.
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A Frozen Woman
(summary)
In the review below, the critic summarizes the plot of A Frozen Woman. French writer Ernaux continues her thinly disguised fictional autobiography with A Frozen Woman, this time recalling with numbing intensity her passage to a womanhood trapped by convention and domesticity.
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A Frozen Woman
(summary)
In the review below, Kuebler favorably assesses A Frozen Woman, highlighting Annie Ernaux's unflinching, unabashed prose and its autobiographical emphasis. The review discusses the narrator's chaotic childhood and her fearless sexual and intellectual discoveries, noting that the despair in A Frozen Woman is more complete and shattering.
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A review of La Place and Une Femme
(summary)
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Ernaux, Annie (Vol. 184)
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Annie Ernaux: A Life Full of Irony and Outrage
(summary)
In the following review, Jenkins regards A Frozen Woman as a “disquieting book,” contending that “what ails Ernaux may be the ennui of privilege, the affliction of the upwardly mobile.”
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Snapshots from the Edge
(summary)
In the following positive review of A Frozen Woman and Exteriors, Osborne lauds Ernaux's “ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.”
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Annie Ernaux: Diaries of Provincial Life
(summary)
In the following essay, Ernaux and Simson explore Ernaux's unflinching examination of her past, emphasizing her reluctance to heroize her experiences, her journey to becoming a writer influenced by her family, and her distinctive narrative style that blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, while focusing on social and personal realities.
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Review of Exteriors
(summary)
In the following review, O'Brien commends Ernaux's descriptive ability in Exteriors, calling the work 'a remarkable piece of writing.' He discusses how Ernaux foregrounds details and descriptions in her writing, isolating them from the traditional narrative structure, and recognizes the everyday and mundane aspects of life.
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Ernaux's Testimony of Shame
(summary)
In the following essay, Kritzman evaluates Ernaux's treatment of shame in La honte, noting how effectively the author portrays the emotion and its fragmenting effect on self-identity.
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Review of La honte and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit,”
(summary)
In the following review, Meyer finds La honte and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit” to be complementary books that provide telling insights into Ernaux's past.
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Review of Shame
(summary)
In the following review, Buckeye applauds Ernaux's unflinching commitment to literary self-examination in Shame. Each book of Annie Ernaux's is the same book, each an effort to explain, resolve and understand the original sin; that she was encouraged by her working-class parents to go further in school than they did so that she might have opportunities they did not; and that the result of her education was to drive a wedge between their lives and hers.
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Writing from Experience: The Place of the Personal in French Feminist Writing
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Thomas and Webb discuss how the autobiographical works of Ernaux and Marie Cardinal fit into the genre of French feminist writing—écriture féminine—examining the critical reaction to their work in France and abroad.
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Abortion and Contamination of the Social Order in Annie Ernaux's Les armoires vides
(summary)
In the following essay, Cottille-Foley maintains that the motif of abortion in Les armoires vides “functions as a powerful expression of the protagonist's social alienation.”
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Fiction, Autobiography and Annie Ernaux's Evolving Project as a Writer: A Study of Ce qu'ils disent ou rien.
(summary)
In the following essay, Day characterizes Ce qu'ils dissent ou rien as an autobiographical novel and a significant work in the evolution of Ernaux's narrative technique.
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The Dialogic Self: Language and Identity in Annie Ernaux
(summary)
In the following essay, Johnson argues that Ernaux's narrative style is a projection of her personal identity and comments that, throughout her oeuvre, “Ernaux traces the coming into being of a female speaking subject, buffeted by the currents of contending discourses against which she struggles to define herself.”
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Memory Stains: Annie Ernaux's Shame
(summary)
In the following essay, Miller maintains that the feelings of shame and self-pity expressed in Shame transcend class boundaries and function as a unifying thematic concern for Ernaux's readers.
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Ethnographers of the Self
(summary)
In the following review, Miller compares Shame with Anne Roiphe's 1185 Park Avenue, asserting that the works are connected by “scenes of emotional soil that stain memory, leaving a residue of unresolved emotion—and the scars of witness.”
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Review of “I Remain in Darkness,”
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Sallis praises Ernaux's “ambitious” combination of fictional and autobiographical details in “I Remain in Darkness.”
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Revisioning the ‘Matricidal’ Gaze: The Dynamics of the Mother-Daughter Relationship and Creative Expression in Annie Ernaux's ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ and La honte.
(summary)
In the following essay, Day explores the parallels between “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit” and La honte, focusing on the role of the mother-daughter relationship in Ernaux's work.
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‘We Are What We Eat’: Food, Identity and Class Difference in Annie Ernaux's Les armoires vides and La femme gelée
(summary)
In the following essay, Lancaster posits that food functions as a signifier of class in Les armoires vides and La femme gelée and notes that both narratives “cast doubts on the possibility of achieving social integration by personal efforts at betterment.”
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Review of L'événement
(summary)
In the following review, Genova compliments Ernaux's attempts to present a literary examination of an emotionally-troubling incident in L'événement. A new book by Annie Ernaux, L'événement, not only presents a first-person narrative describing the events of a difficult experience for a young woman in Rouen in 1963; it also simultaneously offers a study in memory and time, in the dynamics of the elusive nature of human emotion and the individual attempt to recapture, reexperience, and translate in writing an episode of deeply emotive subjectivity.
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Women on Women and the Middle Man: Narrative Structures in Duras and Ernaux
(summary)
In the following essay, Marson contends that a comparison between Une femme and Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol v. Stein provides a terrain for questioning the specificity of women's writing, by asking how they both use and perceive the language of narrative.
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Annie Ernaux's Shameful Narration
(summary)
In the following essay, Willging examines the recurring authorial voice in Ernaux's works, arguing that the author's surprising admissions in La honte represent an attempt on Ernaux's part to bring a sense of closure to her autobiographical accounts of her adolescence.
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Writing the True History of Love
(summary)
In the following review, Dallas compares Se perdre with Ernaux's earlier work Passion simple, asserting that Passion simple presents a more engaging blend of “fact and fiction.”
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Passion simple and Madame, c'est à vous que j'écris: ‘That's MY Desire.’
(summary)
In the following essay, Viti draws comparisons between the definition of desire in Ernaux's Passion simple and Alain Gérard's Madame, c'est à vous que j'écris. The essay explores how both texts exemplify the contemporary 'he said, she said' phenomenon, highlighting the differing perspectives on a past sexual relationship and the fundamental feminist notion that gender informs writing as well as reading.
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Review of Se perdre
(summary)
In the following review, Abramson explores the role of truth in Se perdre and comments that the work investigates “the relationship between experience and its representation in writing.”
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La vie extérieure: 1993-1999
(summary)
In the following review of La vie extérieure: 1993-1999, Meyer contends that “Ernaux's talent lies in her distinctive style, characterized by its simplicity, truthful nature, and occasional brutal violence.”
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Unsafe and Illegal
(summary)
In the following essay, Miller views Happening as both an account of Ernaux's illegal abortion and also a meditation on the nature of memory.
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Review of Happening
(summary)
In the following review, Howard praises Ernaux's honesty and descriptive detail in Happening. He discusses how Ernaux returns to the experience of her illegal abortion, contrasting it with her previous work, Cleaned Out, and highlights the emotional complexities and contradictions present in her narrative.
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Annie Ernaux: A Life Full of Irony and Outrage
(summary)
- Further Reading