Stylistic Subversion: Écriture Plate, Écriture Courante, and Parler Femme in Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras

Abstract

Luce Irigaray proposes parler femme as a feminine symbolic order that resists patriarchal linguistic structures, which have historically silenced or distorted women’s experiences. She advocates for a language “by women, of women, and for women,” rooted in female subjectivity and multiplicity. Annie Ernaux (1940 -) and Marguerite Duras (1914 – 1996) reject the linear, authoritative, and logical narrative forms attributed to masculine discourse and embrace fragmentation, silence, emotional ambiguity, and bodily memory to express feminine perspectives. The discussion will also incorporate Ernaux's écriture plate, which rejects ornamental prose and adopts a sparse, clinical tone. This stylistic choice resists emotional excesses and emphasizes the rawness of female experiences like abortion, illness, aging, class shame, and illicit affairs. In A Woman's Story and The Years, Ernaux refuses to romanticize or dramatize her experiences. Her minimalist style blurs the line between personal and collective history, often adopting the third person narrative of “his,” “her,” “them,” and “theirs,” to portray a universal experience. Duras's écriture courante reflects fragmented, elliptical prose which destabilizes linear narrative and coherent identity. Her style dissolves boundaries between narrator and subject, past and present, mirroring Irigaray's notion of feminine language as fluid, decentred, and plural. Duras in The Lover (1985) and Hiroshima Mon Amour dismantle coherent narrative structures by privileging absence, gaps, longing, and silence, the elements that Irigaray identifies as key to parler femme. Both writers celebrate ambiguity, repetition, and openness. This paper will explore parler femme as a form of feminist resistance and probes how these authors challenge and disrupt the symbolic order of patriarchal language.