Taboo Fantasies: Teaching Annie

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Taboo Fantasies: Teaching Annie

Taboo Fantasies: Teaching Annie

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Siobhán McIlvanney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners

The XConfessions Series Depicts Sex After 70 As It Really Is

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.One evening ‒ it was our last day ‒ in Tours, we had dinner in a brightly-lit restaurant where the walls were lined with mirrors, frequented by a sophisticated clientele. My father and I were seated at the end of a long table set up for the group. The waiters were paying little attention to us; we had to wait a long time between courses. At a small table nearby sat a girl aged fourteen or fifteen, suntanned, in a low-cut dress, and an elderly man who appeared to be her father. This was underscored, she said, by the performance of the lead actor, Anamaria Vartolomei. “In her body, in the way she walks, in her gaze, her gestures, she brings into existence, in the strongest sense of the word, the ordinariness of this tragedy: going to class, or to a student party, and having to find a solution, and then money, because time is inexorably moving forward within her body. No self-pity, or tears… just determination.” Art brings to light – makes exist – reality unhinged from its contingencies, its dispersal into particular existences. A painting, a book, or a film that depicts an abortion ‘puts something into the world’: it’s no longer something personal, hidden, or only a women’s problem, but that it concerns all of humanity. Professor in French and Francophone Women’s Writing; Head of Department of French, King's College London

Annie Ernaux wins Nobel literature prize French author Annie Ernaux wins Nobel literature prize

The French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel prize in literature at the age of 82. Of the 119 awarded, Ernaux is only the 18th woman Nobel laureate in literature and the first French woman to have won the prize. The chairman of the Nobel Literature committee, Anders Olssen, described Ernaux’s work as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean”. ALLURE: This is your main motivation for doing the work you do, right? So many kids are learning about sex from watching this stuff.

Class conflict

E.L.: They watch it and then they reproduce in their real lives what they see. We need to educate children better. I'm not going to send my daughters to a bar without talking to them about alcohol and drugs and the risk of leaving your glass somewhere, but we tend to leave children with access to the Internet without talking to them about what that involves. And 1942 is only 20 years before Anne and her friends sit in their amphitheatre; they live in a world that is still processing the horrors of the second world war. France’s former colonies fought for their independence: the first Indochina war ended eight years earlier, and the Algerian war has only just ended the previous year, another debacle to which the French establishment refused to put in words – they called it the événements en Algérie, the “events” in Algeria, using the same word Ernaux chose for her title. “This thing,” Ernaux writes, “had no place in language.” Some call Ernaux a pioneer of autofiction. Whatever you term it – fiction, memoir, autobiography or, as Deborah Levy has it, living autobiography – it has been a life’s work that has eroded the boundaries between such categories and seen her lauded in France and cemented on school and university curriculums there. In the English-speaking world she is less well known. The small publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, which also publishes the work of fellow Nobel laureates Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk in translation, has doggedly championed her in a climate that can often be indifferent to literary work in other languages. I imagine it’s a pleasure for her English translators, Tanya Leslie and Alison L Strayer, to work with her clean, almost clinically precise prose which somehow manages to so richly evoke true life. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Annie Ernaux ‘It plunged me back to waiting for a period’: Annie Ernaux

But she has also been asked many times in promoting the film if it espouses a “female gaze”, a term that has been popularised in French cinema over the past few years, in part thanks to the work of the French writer and scholar Iris Brey. Her book Le regard féminin ( The Female Gaze, 2020) built on a tradition of feminist film theory to offer a mode by which a film could be understood, or not, to enact a female point of view, “a gaze,” as Brey wrote, “that allows us to share the lived experience of a female body onscreen”.Their XConfessions film, Soulsex, will be released on March 14. Read more about the project in our conversation with Lust below.

Carol Cross — The Movie Database (TMDB) Carol Cross — The Movie Database (TMDB)

In Happening, Ernaux writes, “I don’t believe there is a single museum in the world whose collections feature a work called The Abortionist’s Studio”. Why, I asked her, is it so important for artists or writers to depict it, to tell the stories of their own bodies? People asked me, why make this movie now,” when abortion is legal in France? But, Diwan points out, “what happened in France is still unfortunately the case in many countries. And while I was making the film, I learned what was happening in Texas, where they were challenging Roe v Wade, and then people’s reactions changed completely. They started saying it was good to make this film now, that it was necessary.” Diwan chose not to integrate these present-day reflections, in a voiceover for instance. “If I had included the author looking in the rearview mirror I would have confined this film to the past,” she said. And in her adaptation, Diwan tells me, it was important that Happening not feel like an artefact. Growing up in a socially divided environment meant Ernaux felt ashamed of the supposedly distasteful aspects of her upbringing, such as the working-class environment of her father’s cafe or her mother’s shirking of the norms of middle-class housewifery and femininity, which she writes about in A Frozen Woman.These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Ernaux continued. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” And then, perhaps, to become celluloid images projected into a dark theatre, or pixels on a small rectangular screen that hasn’t yet been invented, adapted by a woman who hasn’t yet been born, merging into the lives and heads of those who live in a world where some can and have had legal abortions, and where millions of others still cannot. The way she excavates her own life without shame or supplication and offers it to us feels supremely generous. The reader might be silent on his or her own mortifications or moments of pain, but a small part of them can reside in Ernaux’s words, if we let them, and in the process free us – if only momentarily. I have rid myself of the only feeling of guilt in connection with this event: the fact that it had happened to me and I had done nothing about it. A sort of discarded present. Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people. Excerpted from Happening by Annie Ernaux, This approach to writing is underpinned by a mission. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. By writing simply about her own experiences, she also wants to write into literature the collective experience of the French working-class.



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