The “dissolving margins” of Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels: A cognitive approach to fictionality, authorial intentionality, and autofictional reading strategies

Using Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as case study, this article presents a cognitive approach to fictionality and authorial intention using Text World Theory and Mind-Modelling. It investigates two forms of ontological distortion: readers’ (mis)classification of the novels’ genre (as autofiction or autobiography) and the problem posed by the author’s pseudonymic identity. The analysis has three parts: first, I conduct a Text World analysis of the novels’ syntactic/stylistic similarities to autobiography and, in doing so, reveal its ontological structure; second, I consider the ontological liminality of narration and the ways in which readers build an authorial mind-model of Ferrante; thirdly, I explore the assessment of critics and/as readers of the text’s fictionality and the impact of Ferrante’s pseudonym on perceptions of authorial intentionality and the authorial mind-model. Ultimately, I argue that a cognitive approach offers greatest insight into readers’ interpretations of authors and of fictionality

Smarginatura: The Art and Politics of Elena Ferrante

In the Neapolitan Quartet, a sprawling epic following the lives of two women in post-war Italy, the author, Elena Ferrante, explores the intimate relationship between politics and art, pushing at the borders we often construct between the two. At a particularly critical moment in the novels, the central character, Elena Greco, a poor girl from Naples who rises to the position of a successful novelist, is told by her more politically radical friends that she is not doing enough, that “this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.” But then, when is? The current political climate in Italy is in a state of immense uncertainty. While modern Italian history is littered with such windows, the rise of the Brothers of Italy party, bringing with it a far-right, nationalist political agenda the likes of which the country hasn’t faced in eighty years, is unquestionably extraordinary. Much of the existing discourse surrounding Ferrante\u27s work focuses on her portrayals of female friendship as well as cultural and family dynamics, less on the politics of the novels, which initially appears to evolve primarily in the background. However, a closer reading reveals layers of political dimension, deeply interwoven into nearly every facet of the novels: the depoliticization and disenfranchisement of women in Italian society, the lack of recognition for art by women writers, the deemphasis on art as a politically engaged, and even politically transformative, act. In doing a close reading of the central female characters in Ferrante’s work, as well as an examination of the enigma of the author herself, this paper hopes to illuminate both the artistic and political barriers faced by women writers in Italy today as well as the ways in which Ferrante—in her writing and her actions—proposes to navigate and transcend these spaces, ultimately demonstrating the immediacy, relevance, and crucial nature of politically engaged art for today\u27s Italy

Elena Ferrante as the classics

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Narrating Intensity: History and Emotions in Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante

This dissertation examines the representation of emotions in My Brilliant Friend and in two Italian novels written between the 1960s and the 1970s – La Storia (1974, History: A Novel) by Elsa Morante (1912-1985) and L’arte della gioia (The Art of Joy, 1998/2008) by Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996). However, rather than remaining centered on these works’ emotive landscapes alone, I seek instead to trace the continuities that link these two “historical” novels of the past to Ferrante’s successful and more recent tetralogy. I look at the representation of emotions and at what I call “moments of intensity” – moments of disruption in the narrative sequence, along with stylistic and linguistic rupture, used to convey the characters’ modified perception, rather than the affective reaction of the reader – in order to illuminate these works’ multi-layered view on women and history, and to show how the characters’ emotional responses and moments of narrative intensity are intrinsically connected to the authors’ visions of history and women. Thus, my research reflects on the sudden popularity of the contemporary Italian novel within the global literary scene while also looking beyond national borders to argue more broadly for the interconnectedness of emotional intensity, historicity and narrative form