A dialectic between presence and absence, remembrance and oblivion, testimony and silence, body and its trace reflects the gist of the most recent Ernaux’es book. It constitutes not only plenteaus thematic confluence but also or even majorly an axis of the book’s construction. Its structure encompasses various layers such as: rhetorical, stylistic and typographic, which separately and together combined reside in prevailing tensioned coexistence of presence and absence.
This essay deals with the problem of the “End of Art” through a critical reading of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008). The analysis of two physiognomic aspects of the book — the white space and the list — reveals some critical points of Ernaux’s poetic of distance: the conflict between the material side and the sensitive side of memory; the rejection of rhetorical invention (inventio) as creation and self-expression; and the attempt to overcome the limits of traditional autobiographical writing. Against the dominant attitude in scholarship, which has mainly focus on the authors Ernaux quotes in the book, I explore other possible connections, through a non-continuistic model of temporality. The problem of the “End of Art” is finally reversed in the specular and complementary problem of the crisis of criticism, on which I focus in the final remarks, by advancing a proposal for another relationship between criticism and common sense.
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