The Tv Series My Brilliant Friend : Screen-shaping Ferrante's Storytelling for a Wider Audience (original) (raw)
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Respectus Philologicus
In the screen adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling novel “My Brilliant Friend”, the first foreign language co-production of the American pay-cable network HBO with the Italian public broadcaster RAI, as a specific requirement of the American producers, the Italian of the main characters has been transformed into Neapolitan, a thick regional dialect mostly appropriate to tell the story of a life-long friendship on the backdrop of the 1950s poor outskirts of Naples, the main city of southern Italy. Starting from some background theories of cultural aspects of translation together with audiovisual translation, the aim of this presentation is that of analysing how English subtitlers have faced the translation of the dialectal elements in such a culture-bound audiovisual text and to what extent their choices depend on those made by Italian subtitlers, then discussing about the sociocultural implications of the solutions adopted. The data have been organized and presented with refe...
A Fascinating Trip Through Literature in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
15th International Conference on Social Sciences. Proceedings, Volume II, 2018
In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, more than a multidimensional frame of the contemporary Italian reality, a panoramic view of European and American literature is present. Such a view reflects the author’s serious engagement and reveals, in part, her literary models. In the present paper, emphasis is put on the author’s testimonies, both direct and internal, about the origin of her resources: Virgil, Leon Tolstoy and Louisa May Alcott are the ones treated here.
Melodrama or Metafiction? Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels
The Modern Language Review, 2018
The fusion of high and low art which characterises Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels is one of the reasons for her global success. This article goes beyond this formulation to explore the sources of Ferrante's narrative: the 'low' sources are considered in the light of Peter Brooks' definition of the melodramatic mode; the 'high' component is identified in the self-reflexive, metafictional strategies of the antinovel tradition. Particular attention is given to the reflection on the act of writing (four metaphors are discussed). The Neapolitan Novels are presented as self-reflexive texts: a 'postmodern' novel of formation of a writer who while narrating thinks about the writerly process and what it means to be a writer, particularly a woman writer today. Melodrama, according to Peter Brooks' famous formulation, is 'a mode of heightened dramatisation inextricably bound up with the modern novel's effort to signify'. 1 Originated in the popular tradition of the pantomime, developed in the theatre, melodrama found fertile ground in the literary genre of the novel which was reaching its peak in the nineteenth century. In Brooks' exploration of the works of Balzac and Henry James, the 'melodramatic imagination' combines the categories of 'novel' and 'romance' (if we adopt the distinction of the Anglo-American tradition) by operating halfway and taking from both: its subject-the ordinariness of life-from the former and its strategies from the latter ('quest, escape, and fall-expulsion-redemption are in fact all structures that can be classed in the general category
Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels: Retelling history through gendered fiction
Journal of Romance Studies, 2018
Set for the most part in a violent and poor post-Second World War Naples, Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale (2011) [My Brilliant Friend (2012)] tetralogy, besides chronicling the lifelong friendship between the two main characters, Elena and Lila, also oers a cross-section of Italian history of the last seventy years through a revisited Bildungsroman structure. Based on this premise, the article analyses some of Ferrante's narrative choices that combine genre and gender elements in readdressing and retelling, from an embodied female-gendered viewpoint, Italian historical turning points, such as the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the collapse of left-wing ideologies and the progressive degeneration of the Italian political system from the 1980s onwards.
In recent years a growing number of Italian film-makers have made a conscious effort to create a cinema that testifies to the great trends of the current epoch: globalization, emigration and displacement. A moral seriousness reminiscent of neorealism has re-emerged, accompanied by a return to the ethics and techniques of documentary which defined that earlier movement. The ambition to expose the country's vices, a goal shared among fiction and non-fiction film-makers alike, is implied in a struggle to express this new global environment. Beginning with the notion of 'Empire' as defined by Michael Hardt and Anotnio Negri, Luca Caminati investigates the changing social and cinematic terrain of Italy through the artistic production of
Reading in Translation. Online journal edited by Stiliana Milkova, 2020
Translated from Italian by Rebecca Walker. The long-awaited English language version of Tiziana de Rogatis’ Elena Ferrante’s Keywords, recently published by Europa Editions, has been made possible thanks to the work of translator Will Schutt. The volume is ordered thematically by keyword and is divided into seven chapters, preceded by a comprehensive introduction which does the dual work of outlining the author’s approach and positioning the phenomenon of Ferrante Fever in its global context. The volume closes with a conclusion – exclusive to the English language version – in which the author pulls together the threads of her critical journey through Ferrante’s realism, and liberates the power of storytelling from the cultural quicksand of postmodernism.