Stanford Humanities Center
Elena Ferrante
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.
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Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels capture how Lenù’s existence, rather than challenging mythologies of meritocracy as it should, mistakenly reaffirms that meritocracy functions well and that education might be a great equalizer, despite literary and historical realities that suggest otherwise.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
