Pour une lecture critique de Les Années d’Annie Ernaux

Abstract

This essay deals with the problem of the “End of Art” through a critical reading of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008). The analysis of two physiognomic aspects of the book — the white space and the list — reveals some critical points of Ernaux’s poetic of distance: the conflict between the material side and the sensitive side of memory; the rejection of rhetorical invention (inventio) as creation and self-expression; and the attempt to overcome the limits of traditional autobiographical writing. Against the dominant attitude in scholarship, which has mainly focus on the authors Ernaux quotes in the book, I explore other possible connections, through a non-continuistic model of temporality. The problem of the “End of Art” is finally reversed in the specular and complementary problem of the crisis of criticism, on which I focus in the final remarks, by advancing a proposal for another relationship between criticism and common sense.

Keywords

• annie ernaux
• the years
• picture
• memory
• crisis of criticism