The Ferrante Letters
An Experiment in Collective Criticism
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- US$26.99
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- US$26.99
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Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together.
In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.
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As this thoughtful and thought-provoking compilation records, over the summer of 2015 four English professors decided to try out a new approach to criticism. Seeking to carry out a flexible, "permeable" dialogue instead of solitary study, Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards (from, respectively, Princeton, Oxford, Adelphi, and Yale), settled on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. In hopes of "encoding the intimate labor of conversation as part of a scholarly work," they exchanged letters recording their responses, both intellectual and visceral, to reading Ferrante's epic tale of female friendship in post-WWII Italy ("Oh Nino," Richards laments of one character, "why are you such a tool?"). Ferrante's stylistic choices produce debates about narrator reliability, the erasure of women from public spaces, and the tension, in Emre's words, between the "incessant need to minister to another human being" experienced by mothers and the "unbroken time and seclusion" sought by writers. The letters are followed by more considered essays from each contributor written a few years later, including Emre's on what Ferrante's decision to remain pseudonymous says about the nature of authorship. Several guest writers also contribute their thoughts in an appendix. The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans.
