Elena Ferrante
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The success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (2011-14) has sparked worldwide buzz in and out of academia, in literary journals, and in book clubs. Ferrante is the author of eight novels, a collection of papers related to her work as a writer, Frantumaglia, and a children’s book, The Beach at Night. [fn]
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In Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2021 adaptation of Elena Ferrante's 'The Lost Daughter,' the last sentence of the book ("I am dead, but I'm fine") changes as Leda says, "I'm alive." By changing the death that Leda's experience motherhood entails, Gyllenhaal creates her own Leda, a woman who is different from that in the Ferrante's text.
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By Invitation
When the televised adaptation of Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend makes Turin the home of Elena Greco’s future husband’s family, it undoes the emancipatory energy the city generates in Ferrante’s novels.
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By Invitation
Ferrante leaves the reader with a reflection on failure. With this novel, the author attempts to scour the failure of progressive culture’s great projects of emancipation and education, as well as the failure to rework an ending and a trauma: those of a dualistic geopolitical system.
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By Invitation
Despite our horror, there is something undeniably positive that Claudio Gatti’s revelation accomplishes for readers and scholars of Ferrante: in spite of its intent, it confirms the absolute truth of Ferrante’s La frantumaglia as a programmatic work, completely coherent with the writer’s thought on authorship.
Journal Article
Peer Review
The article explores the theme of reading and writing in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. The fictional character of Elena, the writer, will be analysed in its relationship with Lila, the non-writer. In the symbiotic relationship between the two friends, reading and writing appear as something more complex than simply a way of redeeming themselves from their oppressive reality (in Italian).
Interview
By Invitation
Ann Goldstein, Ferrante's English-language translator, discusses her path to translation and the wide range of work she has brought to an Anglophone audience.
Intervention
Her run-on sentences are the mechanism for producing a distinctive reality effect. They deny, at the micro-level, any logical cohesion or narrative arc or life story, even as they are part of a retrospective narration whose end is never really in doubt.
Essay
By Invitation
"While L'amore molesto does not reveal what love itself is, it certainly makes it clear that the act of loving and being loved is a viscous affair. One we cannot escape from, as it adheres to the self as skin does to flesh. We can only, this novel suggests, try to understand it, or rather, mold it and reimagine it in an effort to make it coherent—palatable."
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By Invitation
Alfano ponders the obsession with Ferrante's 'real' identity, and how we can honor an absent author.
Journal Article
Peer Review
Mi chiedo come mai questa favola aspra e scomoda che è L’amica geniale sia stata condivisa o anche solo intuita da così tante lettrici e lettori, al punto da fare di questa quadrilogia uno dei testi più apprezzati dell’attuale World Literature. Forse perché abbiamo tutti bisogno oggi di una narrazione che ci mostri dall’interno il nucleo oscuro della nostra contemporaneità.
Journal Article
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Who's afraid of Elena Ferrante? De Rogatis considers the controversial status of Elena Ferrante's work within the world of Italian criticism.
Journal Article
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L’intera quadrilogia de L’Amica geniale è un trattato acutissimo sulla relazione esistente, dagli anni del dopoguerra a oggi, tra lingua italiana e dialetto (in questo caso, quello napoletano).
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Peer Review
Premise and style-wise, “Cat Person” and Elena Ferrante’s body of work could not be more different; but thematically, they share the same beating heart: stories about women navigating the world told uniquely through their eyes, grappling silently with the politics of gender and consent, constantly forced to rebuild themselves for men.
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Peer Review
Historically represented and perceived by the two women themselves as silent and invisible, the female point of view cannot be at the center of this narrative in an immediate and unreflective way.
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Elena Ferrante's new volume, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing (2022), is the culmination of decades of narrative enterprise. It is comprised of four essays dedicated to Ferrante’s formation as a reader and a writer.
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New
By Invitation
Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of The Lost Daughter breaks new ground by narrating a global female imaginary of women and mothers at breaking point (Ferrante’s ‘smarginatura’, or dissolving margins) that remains underexplored and often silenced in cultural production.