Finding Ferrante: Authorship and the Politics of World Literature

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Questions of Identity 1. Cruel Sexuality 2. Working Women 3. Political Cosmologies 4. Genius Loci Notes Index

About the Author :
Alessia Ricciardi is the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (2003) and After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy (2012).

Review :
Constructed as a literary detective story, Finding Ferrante captures the reader as its object of investigation. By revealing who is behind the pseudonym, Ricciardi explores the explosive linguistic energy of an extraordinary writer whose story-telling seductive power, like a Gramscian experiment by literary means, accounts for ‘an intimate public sphere'—one in which the ambivalent yet productive forms of trust between women encounter the generative practices and topographies of female relationality. In Finding Ferrante, Ricciardi offers a lucid, imaginative, and richly informed study of all of Elena Ferrante’s work, emphasizing the crucial concept of resistance that appears throughout the enigmatic writer’s books. Alessia Ricciardi’s fascinating book offers Anglophone readers a new Ferrante: a participant in German and Italian literary traditions, a cunning theorist of realism and of the writing self, an urban cartographer, a political thinker. In expertly “situating” Ferrante’s writing in its intellectual and literary contexts, Ricciardi sets that writing in motion. Despite the numerous interpretive essays devoted to Elena Ferrante's literary work, Alessia Ricciardi's book fills a hermeneutic void. Ricciardi deciphers with great sharpness the game of mirrors and identities of the writer, including that of the pseudonym. In doing so, she succeeds in bringing to the surface a conceptual structure that remained unexplored until now. A necessary book. To understand Ferrante, you have to find her. That’s the brilliant premise behind Alessia Ricciardi’s eloquent account of Ferrante’s radical critique—not only of patriarchy but also of cruel work, sex, and power. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet becomes the scene for Ricciardi’s reappropriation of the novels as a site for reconsidering the joys of anti-work, feminist solidarity, and world literature. One of if not the best book on Ferrante extant, Finding Ferrante is destined to become a classic. Ricciardi ignores the guidance of Ferrante and Frantumaglia to draw her own, refreshingly original conclusions about the Neapolitan Novels and how they fit into not just our understanding of Italian culture but also world literature. This excellent monograph will doubtless divide opinion but should nevertheless be welcomed as an original and seriously considered interpretative effort. A valuable critical work. Ricciardi sets out to examine the ‘extraordinary encounter’ between Italian and German-language literatures staged on the pages of Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels. She accomplishes this goal successfully, proposing a number of original interpretations and mobilizing an impressive set of analytical tools drawn from feminist philosophy and political theory.