The Discreet Shame of Social Class in Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place and A Woman's Story
LIT7-5a-Mon3
Hollie Harder
This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation in this course requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.
March 10 - April 7
In A Man's Place (1983) and A Woman's Story (1988), Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, explores the lives of her parents against the background of rapid changes in the cultural, social, political and economic situation of France in the 1950s and 1960s. A Man's Place recounts the rise of Ernaux's father from the ranks of a laborer to that of a small-business owner, detailing the shame that haunted him and the distance that formed between him and his daughter. In A Woman's Story, Ernaux traces her mother's life as a factory worker, her role in running the family grocery store and café, and her eventual cognitive decline, describing the nearly visceral bond she feels with her mother despite the periods of alienation that separated them. Throughout these works, Ernaux weaves her reflections on the role of writing and language into the telling of her parents' stories and into the connections linking her life and theirs. Ernaux puts into practice her minimalist "flat writing" style, which she feels allows her to recount the lives of her parents' stories as objectively and as truthfully as possible, seemingly without emotion. Although her goal is to relate their lives as objectively as possible, the apparent simplicity of her style paradoxically renders her works even more moving and engaging for readers. In these companion books, Ernaux has transformed two lives spent almost exclusively in the northwestern French region of Normandy into emblems of the human condition.
More facilitated discussion than lecture.
A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux
Translated by Tanya Leslie
A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux
Translated by Tanya Leslie
Additional materials will be provided on a class website and by e-mail links.
Participants will read approximately 40 pages for each session.
Hollie Harder is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director of the language programs in French and Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Brandeis University. In addition to teaching courses on French language, culture, and literature at Brandeis, she has led a discussion group on Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu at the Boston Athenaeum since 2006, and she has been an instructor at BOLLI for more than ten years. She has published articles on Proust, Zola, and Michel Houellebecq.