A Fascinating Trip Through Literature in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (original) (raw)
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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.
Donna Ferrante's Library: Resonance of the Classics in the Neapolitan Novels
2018
Chapter II: The 'Genius Friend' and the Genius (Loci)…………………………………………….54 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………110 Bibliography.………………………………………………………………………………………114 Pietro, Elena opens her own publishing house and moves to Turin. In Turin she writes the short story "Un'amicizia." It is probably because of this book that Lila stops answering her phone calls and then disappears completely. At the very end of the novel, the two dolls that Lila and Elena played with as kids, come back. Someone sends in fact old Elena, in Turin, a packet containing the two dolls. My first chapter, "The Feminine Founding myth: Ariadne, Dido, Medea" is a close reading from Frantumaglia's chapter "Le Città". There, Ferrante talks at length about the possible founding of a feminine city or a women's community. The Classical myths of Ariadne, Dido and Medea come alive in order to indicate the winning models of women (and heroines) in literature. For instance, when a woman can dominate space in a fashion akin to that of Ariadne, she succeeds. In general, however, for Ferrante, cities without love cannot subsist and thrive. This is something that comes back in Lila's words in My Brilliant Friend. 11 My interpretation of this sentence owes a debt to Franco Gallippi's article "Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend: In Search of Parthenope and the 'Founding' of a New City." 12 In his writing Gallippi posits that in the Neapolitan Novels 13 Lila has the project of founding a new city, which would be connected to the need for a change in the style adopted when writing of Naples. The concept of the city without love is rooted, for Gallippi, in Serao's Leggende Napoletane. Moreover, he sees Lila as the siren Parthenope and confirms this identification through a description of the myth by Serao. All in all, my interpretation holds similarities to Gallippi's, but we have very different approaches and conclusions. Importantly, his analysis does not encompass the fourth book of 11 La Frantumaglia, 72. "La città senza amore è una città ingiusta e crudele." Frantumaglia, 77. "The city without love is an unjust and cruel city." L'amica geniale, 156. "Se non c'è amore, non solo inaridisce la vita delle persone, ma quella delle città." My Brilliant Friend, 160. "When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities." 12 Gallippi in Russo Bullaro, Love, 101-128. 13 His identification of the Neapolitan Novels with My Brilliant Friend is inaccurate, because it is based on the Italian equivalent L'Amica geniale, title of the first book of the series as well as cumulative title for the whole tetralogy. Moreover, his analysis focuses on only three of the four books Ferrante wrote. representation of both. For this, the concept of heroization is key. I compare this Hellenistic (and then Roman) phenomenon to that of smarginatura by Ferrante. This notion will also come back at the end of my thesis, when I elaborate on the penates. All of the aforementioned Classical elements should convey the sense of Lila as a genius in the Roman sense, having, among other things, all the appropriate religious paraphernalia. Lila has a sort of lararium 17 for herself and, at the end of the story, she leaves behind two dolls which, I posit, could be seen as penates. The penates are connected to the founding of Rome in the Aeneid and so I maintain that the dolls, in the series, might have a similar meaning. Through intertextual comparisons from the Aeneid, the Neapolitan Novels and Graves' Greek Myths I finally show that these statuettes, or dolls, have the task of strengthening Elena's will to "found a new city", whichever this city might be. "Le Città" quotes the version of Ariadne's myth at Amathus from Graves' Greek Myths. Looking closely at the text, I have found out that Graves references two statuettes that Theseus employs in the process of heroization of Ariadne, creating a cult of her person at the site where she died. Furthermore, according to Graves, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra owned two dolls as children and brought them wherever they went. I believe these references are not casual, because they come from a locus of Graves' text that Ferrante cites explicitly. Through this explanation, I attempt to elucidate that Lila underwent some sort of heroization and that the two dolls might be seen in this context as the statuettes of the dead ancestors, reconfirming in the survivors the will to 'found a new city', one that, following Ferrante's suggestions, is capable of hosting love.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2022
Ferrante Studies is a recent yet burgeoning field encompassing interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship from Italy, Europe, and the anglophone world. A brief history and a brief definition are essential for the contextualization of the book under review. Ferrante Studies can be defined as the global engagement with Elena Ferrante's writing through the lens of different methodologies, disciplines, and interpretive frameworks. It is distinguished by its participants' sustained dialogue with the robust criticism on the subject in both English and Italian and their capacity to read and cite her novels in the original (Milkova 2020). The timeline of Ferrante Studies spans three main periods: (1) before 2011-that is, before the publication of the tetralogy L'amica geniale when we see a small number of articles and dissertation and book chapters appear in Italian and English as early as 1999; (2) the period 2012-2014 when many more essays on Ferrante's earlier novels and on L'amica geniale appear; and (3) after the success of the tetralogy beginning in 2015 with numerous articles, book chapters, monographs and edited volumes being published. Moreover, beginning in early 2015 we see conference panels and seminars on Elena Ferrante which give rise to entire conferences in Italy (2017) and in England (2019) dedicated to her works. Today, Ferrante scholarship in English and Italian includes several seminal monographs, edited volumes, and special journal issues, and a great number of articles, doctoral dissertations, and master's theses, as evidenced by the comprehensive bibliography compiled and updated regularly by the Centre for Contemporary Women's Writing at the School for Advanced Studies at the University of London. And more books, articles, edited volumes, journal issues, and doctoral and master's theses are currently being written and published. In short, the field of Ferrante Studies is here to stay. Alongside these numerous scholarly studies, there have also emerged publications that seem to resist engagement with the field. Although written by scholars, these books do not reference any of the now vast bibliography of academic publications in English and Italian, thereby occupying a position outside Ferrante Studies while intent on producing original knowledge about Ferrante's works. Alessia Ricciardi's Finding Ferrante. Authorship and the Politics of World Literature (2021) is the second book on Elena Ferrante that Columbia University Press has published within a year and a half. Ricciardi's book, like its predecessor The Ferrante Letters
2024
This chapter begins with the global success of Elena Ferrante's tetralogy known as the Neapolitan Novels to sketch an alternative con guration of contemporary Italian literature based on a transnational approach. The author places Ferrante next to case studies of transnational success (Goliarda Sapienza), postcolonial narrative (Igiaba Scego), and translingual authorship (Jhumpa Lahiri) that showcase the porosity of the boundaries of a national canon. Considered together, these authors reveal and institute di erence at the very heart of Italian identity, and concomitantly place Italian literature into a transnational network of references and readerships. Re ecting on diverging methodologies and disciplinary con nes at play in canon formation in Italian studies in Italy and in Anglophone academia, the chapter foregrounds the categories of trauma, gender, translingualism, hybridity, and multiplicity of identity as central to the de nition of a transnational corpus of contemporary literature in Italian. The chapter is divided into two parts: the rst addresses a transnational perspective in Italian studies, argues for an enlarged canon that is representative of di erence within contemporary literature in Italian, and describes the analytical categories that emerge from the application of a transnational approach to the selected hybrid corpus. The second part introduces works by Ferrante, Sapienza, Scego, and Lahiri, and o ers a snapshot of the working of this approach and these categories in these authors' production.
HISTORICAL METAFICTION: ELENA FERRANTE'S NEAPOLITAN NOVELS AS A POSTMODERN RETHINKING OF HISTORY
Anafora, 2023
The Neapolitan Novels (2011-14), translated into English by Ann Goldstein, are a prime example of postmodern literature, distinguished by Elena Greco's unique style of narration, structurally and ideologically. Elena Ferrante utilizes multiple narrative techniques, including unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, and paradoxes, to challenge existing literary and historical narratives' rigidity and present various possible ways of retelling history within the text. This study draws on Linda Hutcheon's postmodern theories of history and historical metafiction to examine the representation of history in the Neapolitan Novels. Specifically, it analyzes the novels' metatextual, intertextual, and metanarrative aspects, exploring how they challenge traditional historical narratives and present alternative perspectives on the past. By providing insights into the representation of history in postmodern literature, this study contributes to the broader discourse on the relationship between history and fiction in contemporary literature.
Lila Unbound: Critical Negativity and Entropy in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels
California Italian Studies, 2020
This article looks at the epilogue of L’amica geniale as the site in the novels where Lila can be said to claim true authorship outside the bounds of Elena’s text. It argues that the mysterious return of the lost dolls at the end of the novel should be interpreted as a triumph on Lila’s part, offering warrant for that contention not by claiming that Lila herself orchestrated the return, but rather by positing that, in the novel’s treatment of the life-plot tension, Lila tends to be representative of the former and Elena of the latter. Thus, in marking the closing of the plot, the dolls index a return to “life,” and thus a recalibration of the text’s energies in favor of Lila. The article then employs Peter Brooks’s narrative theory to understand the thermodynamic effects that the return has on the text, proceeding to apply Teresa de Lauretis’s concept of the “space off” to argue that Lila’s victory extends beyond the simple competitiveness that governs her relationship with Elena and into the institution of an entropic, liberatory desire.