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| An Inquiry into Annie Ernaux’s New Autobiographical Literature with a Focus on Her Memory Media |
| Weng Bingying |
| College of International Studies, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China |
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Abstract Annie Ernaux, a French writer who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is known for her brilliance in new autobiographical literature. If Le Clézio and Modiano, the first two French Nobel Prize laureates in the 21st Century, are oriented towards memory literature based on fiction, Ernaux’s memory literary practice highlights the strong non-fiction appeal rooted in class attributes, and shows the unique characteristics of autobiographical literature in the style of sociology, anthropology, history, and culture in her prudent and objective writing. Taking the cue from Aleida Assmann’s theory of memory media, this paper studies Ernaux’s poetics of memory media, explores the internal relationship between her new autobiographical literature and memory media, and explores the implied categories and memory function of Ernaux’s new autobiographical literature.As Ernaux’s primary memory medium, words are a memory-writing weapon rooted in class attributes, especially represented by the Normandy dialect, the first-person “I” and the impersonal generic pronouns, which bind the self and the race, constituting the substance of the memory of the self, the race and the era. Images are in the pre-verbal state, whether it is a visual image in the mind or an impressionistic view, or a photographic image in material, it constitutes the solid core of memory, and finally, through the paraphrasing of words, the integration and expression of images and words, and the elucidation and transmission of memories are realized. The place has the nature of the “third space”, which is a solid basis for her memories, triggering, giving birth to and clarifying her memory writing while revealing social segregation and identity. All this reverberates in the Nobel Prize Citation, which reveals that Ernaux successfully “uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.The memory media of words, images, and places are both distinct and related, carrying the core connotation of Ernaux’s entire memory space, establishing the self-subjectivity of identity, the social class nature of taste distinction, and the value of life related to the meaning of existence. It is with the help of social, symbolic, spatial and monumental memory media such as words, images and places that Ernaux constructs a socio-anthropological memory space that contains the history of the individual, the collective, and the retrospective times, by her observing, reflecting, analyzing, and deconstructing efforts.Ernaux’s memory writing is different from the traditional autobiographical writing that only focuses on reviewing and narrating the history of one’s personal life and personality. It is also different from the memoirs of heroes in the grand historical background. Nevertheless, it is a kind of autobiographical writing that takes the tiny individual self as the starting point and the base line, dissolves the individual into the collective, and dissolves the self into the race, in a way similar to that of the autobiographical writing in the model of social anthropology. In this way, Ernaux highlights the social reality issues such as the underclass, female existence, language habits, aesthetic tastes, customs, and class distinctions from World War II to the present, and reconstructs the social and cultural history of the French people represented by “I”, and realizes the memory functions of political intervention, commemoration of the past and the deceased, and shaping and gaining immortal prestige, so as to invent a unique way of writing characteristic of Ernaux’s new autobiographical literature.
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Received: 01 August 2024
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2025, Vol. 55 
