Annie Ernaux: The Years and The Use of Photography (In-Person)

“All the images will disappear”—thus begins Annie Ernaux’s modern classic The Years, an experimental work of collective autobiography, narrated in the first person plural and driven by a compulsion to document and remember: people, songs, ads, slang, wishes (fulfilled or not) from the postwar era to the start of the present millennium. The Years, composed in defiance of oblivion, culminates the documentary style Ernaux developed in The Use of Photography several years before—a grappling, in text and image, with the “material proof” of an erotic affair supercharged and overhung by Ernaux’s breast cancer treatment and all its attendant fears: forgetfulness, abandonment, and death. On what terms does the hybrid literary work—multimedia and of composite authorship—negotiate the aesthetic representation of reality? And how does a collective and co-created narration aid us in thinking about the unstable boundary between personal and political experience—not least under the social and political pressures of an evolving postwar European order? 

In this course, we will read The Years and The Use of Photography alongside and through one another, with close attention to the ways each explores private versus public sentiment, and to their shared obsession with documentation. What motivates the drive to document, and can it ever be satisfied? How does a documentary mode mediate between exposure and repression, both individual and collective? And what is the relationship between Ernaux’s literary style and the postwar order, its norms and its imaginary? Are there images that might never disappear?

Course Schedule

Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
January 28 — February 18, 2025
4 weeks

$335.00

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