ENGL 5563 Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels

This course will centre on four of the most globally celebrated and deeply loved novels of the last decade: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (translated 2012), The Story of a New Name (translated 2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (translated 2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (translated 2015). Together these novels form the Neapolitan Quartet, a modern epic of post-War Italy. 

The Quartet is about many things: the workers’ and women’s movements, organized crime, gender and sexuality, and class struggle—but, above all, it is about the danger and power of writing, especially for women. Like most of Ferrante’s novels, the Quartet is driven by women writers: Elena Greco and her lifelong friend, rival, and collaborator, Lila Cerullo. Over a period of more than sixty years, these women write to and with and for each other, often to resist the men who control their society and their lives.

One of the most innovative scholarly responses to the Quartet is a recent book called The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (2020), in which four female scholars write letters to each other, much as Lila and Elena do. In The Ferrante Letters, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Jill Richards, and Katherine Hill interact with Ferrante’s writing in a way that combines scholarly argument with auto-theory and personal reflection. This genre-fluid approach to Ferrante’s work will inspire the writing we do in this course, which will be critical-creative, and allow for both individual expression and the possibility of collaboration.

Required Texts:

Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend
Ferrante, Elena. The Story of a New Name
Ferrante, Elena. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Ferrante, Elena. The Story of the Lost Child
Ferrante, Elena. The Lost Daughter
Chihaya, Emre, Richards, Hill. The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism