Where: St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
When: 8/06/2023-8/11/2023
Curators: Ève Morisi and Lyn Thomas
Description: This exhibition offers a broad overview of Annie Ernaux’s life and works to mark two significant occasions : the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the author in December 2022 and the bequest by Lyn Thomas of previously-unpublished letters and signed editions by Ernaux to the library of St Hugh’s College – formerly a women’s college at the University of Oxford where Lyn Thomas studied in the 1970s before going on to become Professor of Cultural Studies and a renowned specialist of Ernaux’s writing.
Through this close correspondence between Ernaux and one of the first British scholars to study her, and thanks to a wealth of photographs, cultural objects from the mid-twentieth century, t.v. and radio archives, key intertexts and extracts from the writer’s highly varied publications and interventions, the curators Ève Morisi and Lyn Thomas show how, in the course of her fifty-year career, Ernaux has ‘written life’[1] without ever ceasing to dissect class and gender as both realities and social constructs underpinned by complex norms and mechanisms.
Morisi and Thomas retrace and contextualize the author’s experience as a ‘class migrant’, the way in which her novels, auto-socio- and photo-biographical narratives as well as her diaries have given shape to a new language, along with a ‘transpersonal I’ that has firmly challenged numerous forms of socio-economic and symbolic domination in addition to lasting taboos (abortion, rape, female sexuality and illness). The exhibition also sheds light on her commitment as a feminist and left-wing intellectual to an array of political causes on the national and international stages.
Seven thematic strands cover the Nobel laureate’s life trajectory, critical thought and artistic production: origins; influences; class-based and gendered shame; the struggle for abortion; ‘social and sexual guilt’: reading and rebelling; women’s ageing, illness and desire in the 21st century; engagements: Ernaux’s political commitment today.
[1] Annie Ernaux, Écrire la vie, Paris, Gallimard, 2011.
