Mémoire de fille ou la « mémoire pensante » d Annie Ernaux
Mémoire de fille or the ‘thinking memory’ of Annie Ernaux

Summary/Abstract: The new edition of Annie Ernaux’s writing notebook, L’Atelier noir (Paris: Gallimard 2022), brings unprecedented attention to the almost thirty-year gestation that preceded the publication of the text Mémoire de fille (Paris: Gallimard 2016). Both the content and the form of this text reveal a long reflection on the theme of memory or, rather, on the quality of an impossible remembering. Therefore, the article aims to analyse the 2016 text by means of the considerations on Erinnerung and Gedächtnis common to Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. The main theoreticalreference will be the text Mémoires pour Paul de Man (1988) and, starting from the reflections on the ‘thinking memory’, an attempt will be made to analyse the narrative outcomes and discursive strategies adopted by Ernaux within this text that stands, perhaps more than any of her others, as the most radical ‘event’ of her writing.

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