Writing Shame and Desire. The Work of Annie Ernaux

Loraine DAY, Writing Shame and Desire. The Work of Annie Ernaux, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, Peter Lang (Modern French Identities), 2007, 315 p.
ISBN 978-3-03910-275-4


RÉSUMÉ

The mature narrator of Annie Ernaux's La Honte (1997) identifies her father's assault on her mother, in June 1952, as the founding event in her awareness of self and social place, a bedrock memory that represents the one remaining link between the child she was and the woman she has become. As an adolescent, the protagonist is sexually repressed and socially humiliated, incapable of communicating her shame. As a mature woman, the narrator gives a frank account of the childhood mortification that is stamped into her psyche, and (in the concluding lines of the text) flags a later discovery that provides another locus for a sense of identity and continuity: orgasmic sexual pleasure.
This study combines psycho-social and literary perspectives to investigate the interdependency of shame and desire in Ernaux's writing, arguing that shame implies desire and desire vulnerability to shame, and that the interplay between the two generates the energy for personal growth and creative endeavour. The book examines how Ernaux's claim that her 'autosociobiographical' writing is a transpersonal activity that lays bare the mechanisms of social domination relates to her investment in writing not only as a means to explore lived experience, but also as an elemental expression of desire.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

The auto-socio-biographical writing of Annie Ernaux - Interdependency of shame and desire - Life-writing - Symbolic challenge to oppression rooted in class and gender - Theoretical perspective that combines psycho-social and literary approaches - Women's writing in contemporary France.


À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR

Loraine Day is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Southampton, where she teaches courses in contemporary writing and cultural and gender studies. She has published many articles and a monograph (co-authored with Tony Jones) on the writing of Annie Ernaux. She has a strong interest in psychoanalysis, and is currently working on the role of affect in the processes of teaching and learning.