Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle: Agency and the Ambient Language of Everyday Life

Integral to the writing process of both Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle is a practice of documenting the ambient language of urban environments—informational signs, overheard conversations, messages on screens. Ernaux’s Regarde les lumières mon amour (2014) and Calle’s Où et quand: Lourdes (2009) demonstrate how listening to this infra-text allows Ernaux and Calle to reveal the deeper, hidden logics of our increasingly planned and controlled urban settings. Doing so provides a means of recovering agency both in the context of a male-dominated world and in the face of the more generalized alienations of postmodern everyday life.