The literary project of writer Annie Ernaux could be described as an attempt to construct a situated universality that would, through the position of the particular, the personal, open up the collective common reality. With precise literary procedures that include crossing, redirecting and erasing the boundaries between character, narrator, author and reader, and by interweaving text, metatext, intertext and paratext, the author succeeds in creating a polyphonic narrative that challenges various types of conventions, totalization and hierarchy. At the same time, she frames her writing with extra-literary statements that allow considerable control over the reception of her work and (self)placement in a heterogeneous social fabric. By comprehensively constructing her oeuvre “before (poetics), during (poetics), after (aesthetics)”, the writer enacts the transition from Woolf’s own room to Ernaux’s own world, inscribing the life experiences of women into (literary) History.
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