Imitate Annie Ernaux

Teaching Students to Rethink Aging with a Stylistic Exercise

Abstract

This article proposes an exercise for teaching students to reconsider how they think, speak, and write about the life course. University students compose narratives using French Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux’s distinctive prose style as a model. Learning outcomes include: (1) cultivating new ways of understanding one’s own aging; (2) identifying and critiquing how cultural forces shape life course narratives; and (3) developing a rich vocabulary for discussing aging and ageism. The multi-step exercise begins with an optional warm-up activity involving anti-ageist art. Students then practice describing a series of photographs of Ernaux at different ages. Closely reading excerpts from Ernaux’s The Years, students analyze how the author employs an “impersonal” style to challenge conventional progress/decline narratives. Finally, they create their own short age autobiographies by selecting photographs of themselves at different ages and writing about them. This exercise can be adapted for literature, gender studies, sociology, history, and age studies courses.