Games of pictorial specularity in the work of Annie Ernaux
Abstract
This paper examines the reflective role of surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning’s imagery and humorist illustrator Jean-Marc Reiser’s work in the writings of Annie Ernaux. Ernaux acknowledges her admiration for certain Tanning paintings, which are sometimes explicitly referenced in her work, subtly support her writing, or even remain hidden. The “hyper-artistic” presence of Tanning’s art in Ernaux’s narratives illuminates not only the thematic uniqueness of Ernaux’s imaginative world as the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate but also the structural composition of her writing. Similarly, the cartoons of Jean-Marc Reiser–particularly Bridge of the Lost Children–provide a mise en abyme of the anguished personal imagination in L’Autre Fille.
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