In this episode, we discuss Annie Ernaux’s writing in The Years alongside a paper by Jenefer Robinson entitled ‘Style and Personality in the Literary Work’. We consider Robinson’s assertion that an author’s style expresses their personality, and set it in the context of influential views of style formulated by such modernists as Flaubert, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, and by such literary theorists as Barthes, Bakhtin, and Kristeva. Ernaux’s own study of literature coincided with the heyday of literary theory in France. We use Robinson’s paper as a starting-point for reflection on the purposes and effects of the impersonal style Ernaux crafts in The Years.

Hosts: Scarlett Baron, Associate Professor of English at University College London and Alice Harberd, PhD student in the Philosophy Department at University College London.