{"id":1635,"date":"2022-10-24T17:50:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T17:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/worldsuffering\/?p=1635"},"modified":"2022-10-24T17:51:38","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T17:51:38","slug":"1635","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/worldsuffering\/2022\/10\/24\/1635\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Prize in Literature: Annie Ernaux and Writing From\u00a0Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A photo of Annie Ernaux smiling and looking above the camera. (2cordevocali<\/a>\/Wikimedia<\/a>\/CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/figure>\n

The following is re-posted from the Conversation<\/em>. We share this reflection because A<\/em>nnie Ernaux’s writing<\/em>\u00a0centers socio-political context and the experiences, and suffering, of the French working-class.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The French author Annie Ernaux<\/a> has won the 2022 Nobel prize in literature at the age of 82. Of the 119 awarded, Ernaux is only the 18th woman Nobel laureate in literature and the first French woman to have won the prize.<\/p>\n

The academy praised her \u201cfor the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory\u201d.<\/p>\n

From her first book Cleaned Out in 1973, Ernaux\u2019s work has been closely informed by her own life experiences. She has continued to surprise and inspire readers with coverage of daring topics and her innovative approach to genres. Her body of work includes discussions on the act and art of writing, texts incorporating personal photographs, intimate and public diaries, and life-writing that refuses to be contained by categories.<\/p>\n

Class conflict<\/h2>\n

Born in 1940, Ernaux was brought up in Yvetot in Normandy. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. Ernaux attended a private Catholic girls\u2019 school for her secondary education, which fuelled social divisions between her and her parents \u2013 in particular her father, which she explores in her fourth publication A Man\u2019s Place<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Growing up in a socially divided environment meant Ernaux felt ashamed of the supposedly distasteful aspects of her upbringing, such as the working-class environment of her father\u2019s cafe or her mother\u2019s shirking of the norms of middle-class housewifery and femininity, which she writes about in A Frozen Woman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Her childhood was immersed in working-class culture, popular songs and the romantic novels her mother consumed. But from an early age, she was also an avid reader of \u201cclassic\u201d French texts. She then studied literature at Rouen university and went on to teach it at secondary school before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s. This experience gave Ernaux knowledge of French theories and practices of writing, which is evident in her references to authors such as Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir and her self-reflexive comments on the act of writing.<\/p>\n