Description
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. With 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, mutual respect, and mutual recognition.
Acknowledging a debt to Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of class transfuge (defection), domination, and distinction, a fresco 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.