Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne's transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne's adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style. As the novel progresses and Anne's feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.

In "Agency and Embodiment," Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.

Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia feeling the body move encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.

Taking seriously Guillaume Apollinaire's wager that twentieth-century poets would one day "mechanize" poetry as modern industry has mechanized the world, Carrie Noland explores poetic attempts to redefine the relationship between subjective expression and mechanical reproduction, high art and the world of things. Noland builds upon close readings to construct a tradition of diverse lyricists--from Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, and Rene Char to contemporary performance artists Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith--allied in their concern with the nature of subjectivity in an age of mechanical reproduction."

This book approaches Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent through the means of modernist print culture. Engaging primarily the works of Aim? C?saire and L?on Gontran Damas, Carrie Noland shows how the demands of modernist print culture alter the personal voice of each author, transforming an empirical subjectivity into a hybrid, textual entity that she names, after Theodor Adorno, an "aesthetic subjectivity." This aesthetic subjectivity, transmitted by the words on the page, must be actualized -- performed, reiterated, and created anew -- by each reader, at each occasion of reading. Lyric writing and lyric reading therefore attenuate the link between author and phenomenalized voice. Yet the Negritude poem insists upon its connection to lived experience even as it emphasizes its inscriptive support. Ironically, a purely formalist reading would have to ignore the ways in which "formal" -- and not merely thematic -- elements point toward the poem's own conditions of emergence. Blending archival research on the historical context of Negritude with theories of the lyric "voice," Noland argues that Negritude poems present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation. Through close readings, she reveals that the racialization of the author places pressure on a lyric regime of interpretation, obliging us to reconceptualize the relation of author to text in poetries of the first person.