Stephanie V. Love’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

This chapter explores the contrast between the school and the neighborhood as the primary symbolic, ideological, and embodied narrative dichotomy of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. This salient opposition operates as a metonym and metaphor for a series of other binaries characteristic of the “totalizing category” (Keane 47) of post-World War II modernity. In this sense, the school/neighborhood dichotomy in the Neapolitan Novels can be understood as the primary motif of the “modernist chronotope” (Dick). Love argues that despite the attempts of the projects of modernity to discursively create a stark separation between the past and the present, the Neapolitan Novels provide an alternative narrative that describes the fluid, dynamic movements from one chronotopic domain to another.

This book is the first dedicated volume of academic analysis on the monumental work of Elena Ferrante, Italy’s most well-known contemporary writer. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins brings together the most exciting and innovative research on Ferrante’s treatment of the intricacies of women’s lives, relationships, struggles, and dilemmas to explore feminist theory in literature; questions of gender in twentieth-century Italy; and the psychological and material elements of marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Including an interview from Ann Goldstein, this volume goes beyond “Ferrante fever” to reveal the complexity and richness of a remarkable oeuvre.

Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with second-generation bilingual students in the Arabic for Native Speakers/Heritage Learners course at one of City University of New York's (CUNY) senior colleges, I investigate the interdiscursive connections between the students' notion of "broken Arabic" and the concept of "incomplete acquisition and/or attrition" (Montrul, 2013) from SLA research on heritage speakers. This paper moves away from the concept of proficiency towards performativity in order to recognize and support diverse repertoires in motion.

The main focus of this chapter is a recurring theme in the first three books of My Brilliant Friend, which concerns the art of writing. In this Neapolitan epic, therefore, the question of writing about the city of Naples is the problem that Ferrante implicitly and explicitly addresses. And it is Lila who suggests that it is time to go against the things of before and “found” a new city. She is the new Parthenope who has disappeared, and her absence brings into focus her conviction that only love can make people and cities thrive. Therefore, the aim is to characterize this “love,” place it in relation to writing about the city of Naples, and evaluate the effect and responsibility that this entails.