Propriétés stylistiques de l’auto-sociobiographie : l’exemplification par l’écriture d’Annie Ernaux

Abstract

As they fall social matters within and through the style, Annie Ernaux’s texts differentiate themselves from the thought of relationship between sociology and literature by falling under a straight transparency between a text and its context: they shape, even symbolize, exemplify the combination of both sociocritics and sociodiscursives dimensions. The stylistic properties in which the conversion of an intimist life to a social reality hatches indeed implement an exemplification of a personal reality into a group one, and thus engage the auto-sociobiography reality. Annie Ernaux’s writings are de facto underpinned by a rhetoric of the example: their characters are made of typical representations of the relationship to social matters; these representations are even exemplified, in other words increased by a symbolic value at which the text openly refers to; the argumentative and political concerns vested in the representations offer them as exempla to the sociological postulates. These auto-sociobiography characters induce the work of dynamics that transforms the reality of one life into a common reality: Annie Ernaux’s writing is a place of tensions, between social and literature realities, between conjecture and exemplified realities; the leap from one plan to another induces a distancing search from the intimate; the autobiographic pact is thus remodeled. These transformations determine a writing socialization, in the collectivization of enunciation marks, in the extension of the references and in the structures unspecialization. These are all stylistic special features of auto-sociobiography, gathered as studied by the critics, and as given by the author.