L’espace et les souvenirs dans le roman de la place d’Annie Ernaux

Abstract

The novelist Annie Ernaux raises a sensitive issue through her novel The Place, published in 1983. She questions the impact of space and memories in the life of man to tell the truth by narrating real events from his personal life without resorting to fiction. She was a real testimony to personal and collective memory. This novel is considered a committed autobiography because it introduces us to a particular world through the social, psychological, economic and political conditions that the place generates as well as the memories of the characters that remained attached to this place. Through the events of the novel that took place between Normandy and Paris and the reactions of the characters to these events, Annie Ernaux addresses the  theme of space and memories as a social and cultural crisis between two different worlds, that of the poor and the bourgeoisie after the Second World War in France. Consequently, this led to a great change in the construction of French society.