Ce que les expériences extraprofessionnelles font à la pratique professionnelle

Le cas de l’écrivaine Amélie Nothomb

Abstract

This paper is based on the study of Amélie Nothomb's literary practice and its social motors. Its purpose is to show the heuristic scope of broadening the focus of observation of such a “professional” activity to extra-professional agents of socialization. Understanding Amélie Nothomb’s literary path and her personal way of investing her literary and paraliterary activities requires studying the social configurations she went through – even before becoming a writer –, configurations that created and sustained her desire to write, but also shaped her way of seeing the world as well as the questions, and obsessions that characterized her as a socially “made” individual and which came to be expressed in a particular way in her novels. More precisely, I will show how the study of Amélie Nothomb’s extra-professional experiences sheds light on thematic and stylistic aspects of her literary work, such as the particular relationship to language present in her writings.