Footnote:
In English
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web
Description:
Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels achieved stunning global success in part because of the mystery surrounding their pseudonymous author. English-speaking readers were tantalized by her enigmatic biography as well as what they took to be her authentic portrayal of working-class Naples. However, we now know that the person behind the writing is most likely Anita Raja, a prominent translator of German literature whose background is very different from Ferrante's supposed life.In Finding Ferrante, Alessia Ricciardi revisits questions about Ferrante's identity to show how the problem of authorship is deeply intertwined with the novels' literary ambition and politics. Going beyond the local and national cultures of Naples and Italy, Ricciardi reads Ferrante's fiction as world literature, foregrounding Raja's work as a translator. She examines the novels' engagement with German literature and criticism, particularly Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Christa Wolf, while also tracing the influence of Italian thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Carla Lonzi, and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. Considering central questions of sexuality, work, politics, and place, Ricciardi demonstrates how intertextual resonances reshape our understanding of Lila and Elena, the protagonists of the Neapolitan Quartet, as well as the characters and language of Ferrante's other books.This bold reconsideration of one of today's most acclaimed authors reveals Ferrante's works as fiercely intellectual, showing their deep concern with feminist and cultural politics and the ethical and political stakes of literature
"The novels in the Neapolitan Quartet were not, as we now know, written by Elena Ferrante, the mysterious daughter of seamstress in Naples, who now lives abroad teaching classics but by Anita Raja, a prominent translator of German literature, whose father was a judge and whose German-Jewish mother wrote language textbooks. Does any of this matter? Does it or should it change the way we read and think about these best-selling novels? In Finding Ferrante in Contemporary World Literature, Alessia Riccardi argues that Ferrante's biography, which was eagerly consumed by English-speaking readers, has led to a critical reception of the Neapolitan novels that downplay their literary ambitions and political critiques. In examining the Neapolitan Quartet with Anita Raja as author, Riccardi considers four different dimensions of the novels, including sexuality, work, politics, and their status as works of global fiction. Rather than reading Ferrante's novels as works of autofiction shaped by the local and national cultures of Naples and Italy, Riccardi begins by examining how Raja's work as a translator of Goethe, Benjamin, and Christa Wolf and in dialogue with the varied concerns of these writers and world literature more broadly. Ultimately, in viewing these novels as written by Raja and not "Ferrante," Riccardi contends that what is at stake is not the personal authenticity of writing but rather its ethical and political imagination and the ways in which fiction gives expression to ideas and truths not expressed in reality"--