Corporeal Traditions and the Representation of the Other Body in Annie Ernaux’s Autobiography

Abstract

This study seeks to reinterpret Ernaux’s representation of the body and the corporeal traditions evident in her oeuvre in a new context. Rather than viewing the narrator and protagonist—conflated through autobiography—solely as cognitive or mental entities, the analysis approaches them as embodied beings situated within society, where the body serves as the primary catalyst of memory. I argue that the memory dichotomy regularly examined in Ernaux’s memoirs—the separation of personal and collective memory—also emerges in her depictions of the body. Accordingly, this inquiry focuses on Ernaux’s autobiographical writing from the intertwined perspectives of body and personal memory, and of body and society, drawing on French feminist criticism as well as the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Daniel Punday. Shifting attention from the cognition of memory to its corporeal dimensions also requires examining the social perception of the body and its evaluation through class distinctions. This perspective fundamentally shapes the narrative voice and the textual reanimation of the reconstructed past, since in Ernaux’s autobiographies the body appears both as an individual and a social construct—functioning not only as the trigger of memory but also as the site where social norms and individual desires converge.