Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Returning to Reims
After his father’s death a gay intellectual returns to his working-class family and asks why it was easier to write about sexual shame than about the shame of class.
Introduction
Eribon published Retour à Reims in 2009, after his father’s death had brought him back into contact with his working-class family. The book combines memoir with sociological analysis in the manner of Pierre Bourdieu and the writer Annie Ernaux: school appears as a machine that sorts children by class, and upward mobility as a painful conversion that requires unlearning one’s origins. Its political thesis is that his once Communist-voting family turned to the National Front because the left had stopped speaking of class; how far this held for working-class voters in general is disputed in electoral research. The German translation (2016) became a bestseller, and Thomas Ostermeier adapted the book for the Berlin Schaubühne in 2017.
More works by Didier Eribon
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