Autosociobiography: Poetics and Politics, edited by Eva Blome, Philipp Lammers and Sarah Seidel, Treatises on Literary Studies, Metzler, 2022.
The edited volume “Autosociobiography: Poetics and Politics”, edited by Eva Blome, Philipp Lammers and Sarah Seidel, is dedicated to the study of a literary text form that has existed since Didier Eribon's Return to Reims (Return to ReimsThe genre of autosociobiographical writing (2009/2016) has experienced a remarkable resurgence. The editors aim to examine, systematize, and reflect upon this "still young genre" in order to establish it as a relevant object of literary studies and to investigate its literary form (poetics) within the context of its political and socio-analytical claims. The contributions discuss current autosociobiographical texts and their literary-historical contexts under the three main themes of "Literary Epistemology of the Social," "On the Political Nature of Form," and "Transition and Narration."
In the context of annie ernaux from Didier Eribon and Edouard Louis The genre has already been discussed here. The term "autosociobiography" derives from Annie Ernaux, who used the adjective "auto-socio-biographique" to describe her own works. The category describes texts that offer an autobiographically grounded socioanalysis of the class transition and incorporate sociological practices and their associated knowledge. The authors of the contributions note that the genre in German-speaking countries has thus far primarily received impetus from sociology, which is why this volume focuses on literary studies.
The popularity of the genre is largely due to the success of Didier Eribon. Return to Reims Eribon himself cited Pierre Bourdieu and Annie Ernaux, while Édouard Louis recognized him as a "founding figure," thus placing the "Ernaux–Eribon–Louis triad" at the center of previous research. The contributions to this volume focus heavily on this French tradition, but critically broaden the perspective beyond this narrow filiation to include other French authors and the academic context.
Annie Ernaux and the Literary Epistemology of the Social
Sarah Carlotta Hechler's contribution ("Between Autobiography and Autosocioanalysis") analyzes the close connection between Annie Ernaux's autosociobiographical narratives and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Ernaux positions her writing between the "most personal" confession and "objectifying distance." Her reading of Bourdieu's sociological works, in particular The heirs and The reproduction, led to a “feeling of evidence” for her (sentiment of evidence) and to the realization that individual suffering is rooted in objectifiable social facts. Ernaux described this experience as "arrachement à soi" (being torn from oneself) and used it as the basis for her writing project.
Hechler examines Ernaux's writing style, which she considers flat writing (plain/factual writing style) or Writing of the distance (Writing of distance). This form is fundamental to autosociobiography and serves Ernaux to reject any “transfiguration” of reality and to avoid “complicity with the educated reader.” Ernaux accepts the statement that she is “Bourdieu as a novel,” on the condition that “novel” is replaced by “literature.” Hechler elaborates that Ernaux’s texts incorporate Bourdieu’s concepts such as habitus and symbolic violence not just to refer to them abstractly, but to make them tangible on an aesthetic-affective level. In contrast to Bourdieu's Auto-socioanalysisWhile Ernaux aims to objectify the social conditions of experience, he focuses on making social differences tangible through the subjective.
Didier Eribon and the Poetics of Return and Shame
Carolin Amlinger (“Literature as Sociology”) examines the autosociobiographical form based on Bourdieu's work A soziologischer Selbstversuch (2002) and Eribon Society as judgment (2017). Both texts function as “anti-autobiographies” and use the narrative voice of the class transitioner as a “sociological method” to generate social insights and to make the symbolic order of the social describable. Amlinger emphasizes that Eribon’s Return to Reims It can be read not only as an intellectual intervention, but also as an autopoetic formative work of the emerging genre. Eribon's autobiographical narrative embeds his sociological analyses in a collective framework of experience that is intended to legitimize "culturally marginalized […] counter-memories".
Eribon addresses the issue of shame (shame) as a powerful instrument of social subjugation and as a central driving force of his writing. Amlinger concludes that the truth content of Eribon's autosociobiographical writing lies less in objectification than in the "affective breaking" of the illusion about social subject formation.
Eva Esslinger (“Change without Threshold”) examines Eribon Return to Reims With a narratological focus on the motif of the threshold and transgression, she observes that despite the theme of transition, Eribon's narrative represents a "change without a threshold," since the scenic condensation of the crossing (the actual or mental return) is largely avoided. Instead, the arrival in his place of origin, Muizon, is substituted by sociological description. Eribon filters his individual experience through "cultural, that is, literary, theoretical, and political references" (including Genet, Barthes, and Ernaux), thus securing himself within an intellectual frame of reference. Eribon himself describes how it was only his acceptance speech at Yale, in which he spoke publicly about his origins, that provided the impetus to complete the book, whereby his intellectual career (Yale) enabled him to narrate his origins (Reims).
Édouard Louis and the Collectivity of the Serial
Édouard Louis' writings, such as Put an end to Eddy Bellegueule, serve as prominent examples of the genre's resurgence. Louis himself emphasizes the significance of reading Eribon as a transformative experience that enabled him to write about his own life. Louis's emphasis on the social is also highlighted in the volume; he asks whether class must be considered in relation to the individual "man" or whether the genre as a whole is characterized by a network of "serialities" (Louis) functions.
Julika Griem (“Class Goal: Individual Assessment?”) takes up this question of collective scope. She analyzes collective writing experiments in order to subvert the genre's focus on a single narrative voice that has recently dominated the discussion (such as Eribon, Louis).
The academic and intersectional French context
Philipp Lammers (“The Schools of Autosociobiographers”) broadens the focus to include autosociobiographies of French female scholars, including Michelle Perrot, Mona Ozouf, and Rose-Marie Lagrave. He situates these texts within the context of French autosociobiographies. ego-history and the university institutions (EHESS).
Rose-Marie Lagraves deserves special mention. Se ressaisir. Enquête autobiographique d'une transfuge de classe féministe (2021). Lagrave explicitly differentiates her approach from the works of Eribon and Louis, criticizing their “analytical blindness” to the effects of gendered habitus in Bourdieu. Lagrave, who describes herself as transfuge de classe féministe She understands this and rejects the "male plot" of autobiographical accounts, arguing that the working class is historically endowed with symbolic and militant capital, which is often not the case for women. She describes institutions (family, church, school, state) as the true actors in their development.
Mona Ozoufs also French composition (2009) and Michelle Perrot's L'air du temps (1987) are interpreted as institutional autobiographies that reflect the role of schools and educational expansion in postwar society. Ozouf's text addresses the tension between the universalism of the Republic (school) and the particularism of origin (houseLammers summarizes that these female authors understand autosociobiography as a continuation of a commitment and describe their emancipation more as a generational or historical embedding than as a painful breaking away, which distinguishes them from the male “retours”.
Christina Ernst (“Transclasse and transgenre”) draws another important line of differentiation by highlighting the parallels between transclass- and Transgender-narratives examined, in particular Paul B. Preciado's Text Junkie (2008) and Jayrôme C. Robinets My path… (2019). These texts, although focused on gender identity, employ similar autosociobiographical writing styles to illuminate social power relations. Preciado describes his text as an “autotheory” and “body essay,” which describes a practice that generates knowledge from one’s own bodily experience and politicizes it. Like Ernaux and Eribon, Preciado rejects a psychoanalytic reading, as this would pathologize subjectivity. Ernst emphasizes the relevance of the chosen community (chosen family) which is a crucial resource for both Preciado and Eribon (with regard to gay subculture).
Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis in a broader context
The importance of the French tradition for the genre is also addressed in other contributions:
Marcus Twellmann (“Autosociobiography as a Traveling Form”) emphasizes that autosociobiography is a “supranational phenomenon,” even if Ernaux, Eribon, and Louis reinforce the impression of national distinctiveness. He shows that the French debate itself was influenced by the reception of non-French texts (such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy) was shaped. Hoggart's mediation through Passeron and Grignon led to the discussion about miserabilism and populism, which in turn influenced Ernaux's flat writing as a stylistic element, it significantly influenced the style.
Eva Blome (“Formless”) examines Karin Struck’s novel Class love (1973) as a pre-discursive unfolding of the transclass-Subjects. Blome contrasts Struck's unfiltered, preterite-avoiding narrative style of transition directly with the retrospective and "authoritarian narrative style" of current autosociobiographies (such as Eribon).
Sarah Seidel (“Ego Disorder”) examines autosociobiography as pathography, drawing on the work of Thomas Melles. Die Welt im Rücken She uses this to portray ego disturbance as a potential socio-structural threat to upwardly mobile individuals. She draws parallels between Melle's bipolar disorder and the transclasse texts of Ernaux and Eribon, particularly regarding the themes of loss, shame, and the search for belonging.
To the complete volume
This edited volume fulfills the editors' intention of systematically cataloging autosociobiography as a genre by subjecting the French "founding" corpus (Ernaux, Eribon, Louis) to in-depth literary and sociological analysis. It offers important distinctions, particularly between Ernaux's and Bourdieu's approaches (Hechler) and the critical examination of the "male plot" from the perspective of female academics (Lammers, Ernst). The contributions demonstrate that the central French texts have significantly shaped the poetics of the genre (forms of distance, narrative introspection, defense against fiction, use of theory and affect), but that the genre itself is dynamic and continues to evolve both thematically (transgenre narratives) and formally (collective writing, prediscursive forms). The engagement with the French authors and sociologists remains the central point of reference through which "autosociobiography" is defined and discussed as an epistemology of the social in its poetic and political dimensions.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
