The Feminist Book Club 9

13.06.2024

Annie Ernaux: Les Années, 2008.

13. 6. 2024. 

After eight meetings and exciting discussions on Croatian and world literature, with which we have tried to open up a space for dialogue on the relationship between politics and literature, the genre of the political novel, feminist perspectives and reading strategies (while also creating a small reading community), we close the first season of the Feminist Reading Room with a conversation about Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and the award-winning novel Les Années, as well as plans for the new season, which we will announce in September!

Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, has attracted a great deal of attention on the international literary scene. She has been publishing prose since the mid-1970s, and several of her titles have been translated in Croatian.

In the conversation dedicated to her novel, we addressed the following topics: the question of genre, the autobiographical contract and the narrator's departure from traditional autobiographical storytelling, the organisation of the text, the relation between what is seen/experienced and the imagined, the relationship between the individual and the collective, the links between family and social history, the possibilities of an “impersonal” autobiography, the ruptures between generations and the connections between body and memory as well as the literary potential of memory through the body, the development and critique of consumerism, the transformation of the idea of progress in Europe since the mid 20th century, gender and class differences in the education system, questions of sexuality, reproductive rights and feminism, and one of the key questions posed in the novel: where can the resistance come from?

Find out more about the novel at: https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/novels/les-annees