Obliquação em Annie Ernaux: a escrita literária como prática de constituição e transformação subjetiva

Abstract

This master’s thesis investigates the work of French writer Annie Ernaux, analyzing how her literary practice acts as a tool for subjective constitution and relation with alterity. The central research problem lies in understanding how Ernaux’s writing manages to dismantle the centrality of the biographical “I” to make room for an “anthropology of the other,” transforming the account of loss and mourning into a tool for social and ethical investigation that avoids a purely confessional tone. The adopted methodology is qualitative and bibliographical in nature, grounded in a critical perspective that promotes a tensioning between the materiality of the works A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story and a theoretical framework that crosses contemporary literary criticism with speculative anthropology.The work utilizes the concept of obliquity (obliquação), formulated by Alexandre Nodari, to explain how the author transforms herself while narrating her parents’ stories, operating a reconfiguration of herself through language by allowing herself to be affected by the presence of the other. The research results demonstrate that the narrative “I” in Ernaux is, in fact, in a relational position that blurs the boundaries between sociology and literature, document and fiction. The contribution of this thesis to Annie Ernaux studies lies in filling a critical gap: the displacement of the analysis from purely social or memorialistic determinations toward an understanding of the subject as a relational effect, constituted by the intersection of the alterities that shape it. Thus, the research highlights that narrating oneself necessarily implies passing through the other, consolidating Ernaux’s writing as an ethical gesture of restitution and dignification of historically marginalized trajectories.