A Conversation - by Annie Ernaux & Rose-Marie Lagrave Paperback

Book Synopsis

An illuminating conversation between Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux and esteemed sociologist and educator Rose-Marie Lagrave offering invaluable insights from both their lives and work.

More than a dialogue or a debate, these conversations between Ernaux and Lagrave touch on many subjects, from the feminist future to each woman's class histories as seen through the prism of the socio-historic transformations of the postwar period. One an author and the other a sociologist, their conversations go back and forth between lived experience and analysis, and a richness emerges of care and mutual respect and mutual recognition.

Acknowledging a debt to Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of class transfuge (defection), domination and distinction, a frescoe emerges of the last 70 years in France, including references to Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Aron, and Simone de Beauvoir.

These conversations began as a round-table discussion on May 26, 2021. A follow-up conversation occurred on March 24, 2022. A Conversation amounts to an extraordinary expression in book form of solidarity and friendship between two legendary figures who rose above their working class origins while at the same time remaining true to them.

About the Author

ANNIE ERNAUX was born in Lillebonne in Normandy, France, in 1940. In 1972 she read two books by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Les Héritiers and La Reproduction, which argue that the education system only exacerbates existing social inequalities. In 1974, she published her first novel, Cleaned Out, followed in 1977 by What They Say or Else and in 1981 by A Frozen Woman. In 1983, her fourth book, A Man's Place, a portrait of her father was published, and in 1984 it won the Renaudot Prize, placing her firmly on the literary map in France. In the ensuing decades, she continues to write and to publish, each book a whole new universe of insight and remembering. Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, following the International Strega, the Prix Formentor, and many other awards of excellence for her ongoing contributions.

ROSE-MARIE LAGRAVE was born in 1944 in Paris. She became a licensed sociologist in 1969 and defended her graduate thesis in 1979, which was published the following year by Actes Sud as Le village romanesque. In 1982 she attended the seminars of Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron on popular culture, including one titled "Women, Feminism and Research." In 1987 or '88 she met Pierre Bourdieu at the College de France. She contributed to the publication of many books and articles related to feminism, utopia, Communism in Eastern Europe and other topics. She is the author of Voyage aux pays d'une utopie déchue Paidoyer pour l'Europe centrale (1998) and Se ressaisir. Enquête autobiographique d'une transfuge de classe féministe (2021).

SARAH CARLOTTA HECHLER is a scholar of political science and comparative literature who studied at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. She completed a master's degree at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is now a research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin while pursuing her doctorate at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the Free University of Berlin.

CLAIRE MÉLOT is a researcher whose doctoral thesis explores how political, phenomenological, and artistic practices shape our experience of space. Her interdisciplinary work draws on critical theory and architecture, and she has published in work in publications including Trajectoires, Diffrakt, and Textimage.

CLAIRE TOMASELLA is a Ph.D. candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and an associate researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Holding master's degrees in comparative literature (Paris-IV Sorbonne), journalism (Sciences Po Paris), and history (EHESS), she has also worked as an editor and journalist.

PAUL PASQUALI is a sociologist and researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and a member of IRIS (the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues). His work focuses on social mobility in contemporary France--particularly upward mobility through education--as well as the history of social-science methods, archival practices, and scholarly careers in the twentieth century.