‘‘Unknown Structures’’: Annie Ernaux between literature and media

Abstract

This research project proposes the Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux’s poetics as one interested in rendering lived experience as it simultaneously experiments formally. Extending the author’s idea of ‘unknown structures’, proposed in L’Usage de la photo (2005), to the rest of her oeuvre, this research aims to initiate a conversation on formal aspects that have not yet found the right relevance within the academic discourse on Annie Ernaux. Scholars have mainly focused on her books' innovative content and overlooked, if not completely ignored, her compositional habits and the intermedial character of her work. Using the concept of ‘unknown structures’ to underline Ernaux’s interest in form, this project suggests that writing her individual experience as a means to collective biography, for which Ernaux became famous, is ultimately a formal exploration that depends on the artistic deployment of media as both objects and habits. Analysing La Femme gelée (1981), L’Usage de la photo (2005), and Les Années Super 8 (2022), this thesis aims to engage with the structural components of the author’s writing. In particular, the focus will be on how Ernaux only partially and provisionally adopted the boundaries of any one particular literary genre and how she used the interplay between literature and other media to challenge the extent of what could be recollected in a literary form. Drawing on Anna Poletti’s theorization of autobiography as an activity that draws on a range of media forms to materialize the significance of lived experience, as well as Astrid Erll’s work on how traditional literary forms provide familiar patterns to shape experience within a text, this thesis offers a range of examples that demonstrate how we might pay attention to media and forms within Annie Ernaux’s oeuvre in order to find a new way of analysing the relationships of art, media, individual and collective experience.