Dear all,

I want you to know that I will be responding to everyone's paper by tomorrow, and also posting grades tomorrow (morning). If I don't have both assignments, I will have no choice but to fail you. Grades are due on the 5th (but CUNY First will likely be down on the 4th).

In Other Words (In Altre Parole)

Choose your favorite passage from the book. Copy it here…. (should be no more than a paragraph). Do an analysis, focusing not only on what is written but how it is written, her choice of language and images. Discuss why this passage resonated with you.

Second writing assignment due June 30th midnight

For the next assignment, you will be required to write an essay in which you explore connections and points of departure between the works of two of the authors we have discussed so far. Choose ONE of the following topics and come up with your own thesis/argument statement, considering not only plot and theme but also the form the books take, the way they are written, the narrative method (form and content):

1. Authorial Identity

2. Female Friendship

3.  Cultural Hybridity 

I would suggest framing your introduction around the topic of contemporary women writers. Also, as in the first paper, give a brief summary of the author and her oeuvre, and orient the reader as far as historical context. 

Your essay should be 5-6 pages, double-spaced, with an MLA Works Cited Page. It should also engage with at least three scholarly sources…. no ass-kissing allowed, but piggybacking is welcome.

Please bring a synopsis of your argument to our next class.  I will give you some ideas. 

Morrison and Ferrante

This question is not related to Lahiri's work, but I want you to start thinking comparatively in preparation for the next writing assignment.

What connections and points of departure do you identify between Sula and Lila? What connections and points of departure can you trace between Ferrante's and Morrison's representation of female friendships? Between each author's representation of place, and of community?

For Revision

Since some of you are struggling to create literary arguments, I've given you some open-ended questions to consider. The answers to these questions will be your thesis statement. For the second and final assignment, you will have to create and answer your own open-ended question.


For the revision, I'd like to modify the original questions I'd assigned to guide you into creating a more complex thesis statement/argument.

If you chose topic 3, think about the following:
Why is the character of Lila necessary in a female Kunstleroman, a novel that traces the becoming of a woman writer? What does Lila signify in the context of the novel?

OR

Can the friendship between Elena and Lila be considered enabling, disabling, or both? What is unusual about Ferrante's representation of rivalry and competition between two women?

If you choose this, you will need to access 2 articles and interviews which address Ferrante's views on female friendships.



If you chose topic 1 (class consciousness), I'd like you to think about the following:

How is My Brilliant Friend a traditional rags-to-riches story…. and how is it not? How does Ferrante play with her audience's expectations of this genre through fairytale motifs? (You want to consider that, for girls and women, success in fairytales usually arrived through the marriage-with-wealthy-man plot).

OR

Ferrante's audience consists mainly of upper middle-class Americans and Europeans who have fetishized her fiction. Yet her novels challenge classist assumptions, subverting hierarchies between "high" and "low" culture in a postmodern fashion. Discuss, paying attention to issues of form and style as well as content.

Articles on Lahiri and her work

This link offers access to an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri:
http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/1/66.full?sid=e9f9c39a-5670-4d88-b288-60e45221ef16

And here's a link to an article on "Interpreter of Maladies:"
http://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=rr

You can copy these links onto your browser to access them. I've also posted an article on "Interpreter of Maladies" on Blackboard.

Papers

I have finished grading the papers that were shared to me via Google docs or sent as attachments. Should you choose to revise, the deadline is Saturday the 25th, midnight. I recommend you all clarify what your argument is before you begin writing the new draft.

Instructions for Presentations

Presentations should ideally be on Powerpoint and last for 10-15 minutes. You want to do the following to get an A:

1. Identify the author's argument. Highlight and paraphrase it. Define terms which our class may be unfamiliar with (at least three) and explain how they function in the author's argument.
2. Identify which strategy or strategies the author is using to engage with critical sources (see Learning through Writing, pgs. 28-32) and what evidence the author is using to corroborate his or her argument (historical, textual, etc).
3. The most difficult part: Engage with the author's argument using one of the strategies in your Learning Through Writing handbook, with the exception of #2.

Writing Materials on Blackboard

Just a reminder that all writing materials (MLA Works Cited page sample, formatting guidelines, grade determination and contextualizing quotes handout) have been posted under Course Materials on Blackboard.

Shadrock

For our next post, I'd like you to think about the function of Shadrock in the narrative. Why does Morrison include him in a novel that is ostensibly about a friendship between two black girls? In what sense can Shadrock be seen as Sula's foil?

study guide for Recitatif

http://www.eluprogram.com/recitatif.pdf

link to short story Recitatif

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=Y2FsZHdlbGxzY2hvb2xzLm9yZ3xlbmcxNzV8Z3g6NDliYTNmZTg5ZGQ4ZWZlMQ

Recitatif

For our next blog post, I'd like you to reflect on why you think Toni Morrison chooses to keep the races of the two girls in "Recitatif" ambiguous. What does this do to the reader? I'd also like you to talk about the significance of the friendship trope. What is their friendship a metaphor of, and why is it important?

Link to article on Recitatif

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/441512/pdf

Female Sexuality in My Brilliant Friend

Today we related the phenomenon of "dissolving margins" (frantumaglia) in Ferrante's work to shifting boundaries of class and gender in post-war Naples.

For the next post, I'd like you to do an intersectional analysis of Ferrante's representation of sexuality in Adolescence. How does Ferrante represent Elena's sexual awakening? What role do
constructions of class and gender play in shaping Elena's and Lila's relationship with their bodies and their sexuality? Can Lila be considered a queer subject, even though she commands the attention of heterosexual men and capitulates, out of necessity, to the marriage plot? Does Ferrante-- like the famous Italian novelist Elsa Morante, whose work has inspired her own-- reproduce the mind/body dualism through her portrayal of Lina and Elena? In your response, include references to specific scenes or passages from Ferrante's novel.

A link to Dropbox articles on Ferrante

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1b4iy3hjqmcaqwf/AAAVbZHTNnIF3QUdRdaLmn3sa?dl=0

Class consciousness in My Brilliant Friend

For your next post, I'd like you to read one of the articles, interviews with Elena Ferrante, or essays through the link to Dropbox that I emailed you. In your next comments, relate what you learned about Ferrante or her work to your reading of My Brilliant Friend…It's a pretty open-ended assignment. For example, you can focus on a statement Ferrante makes in an interview and make a connection with some aspect of her novel.

I just finished reading Milkova's "Mothers, Daughters, Dolls," which focuses on Ferrante's The Lost Daughter (La figlia oscura), the work she wrote before the Neapolitan series, which she has said inspired it. Milkova notices how Ferrante's portrayal of what she calls  frantumaglia (moments of dissolution, when consciousness becomes a chaotic whirl of 'bits and pieces') always revolves around mothers, daughters, and scenes relating to dolls.  She situates frantumaglia in relation to contemporary theories of disgust, and identifies disgust as a trope in Ferrante's fiction. Even though Lena's revulsion towards her mother's body and her pregnancy can be seen as anti-feminist, Milkova argues that it functions in Ferrante's work to deconstruct normative constructions of femininity, which both in Italy and in the U.S., are tied to motherhood.

While Milkova's analysis is illuminating, it would have been stronger had she taken class into consideration. Elena Greco's revulsion towards her mother, her mother's body, and the Neapolitan dialect is a symptom of her revulsion towards her class, the working class of Naples; the moments of "frantumaglia" experienced by Lila and, to a lesser extent, Elena signify the breakdown of language and culture that belongs to the elite, the literati. I think one of the reasons why the Neapolitan novels resonated so strongly with American readers because they relate an Italian female version of the American success story: Elena and Lila, in different ways, make it out of their class: Elena through education, and Lila through entrepreneurship. Yet they also learn that they can never leave their class behind.

Welcome to the course

Welcome to the course! Below are some links that can serve as an introduction to Elena Ferrante's work:

http://radioopensource.org/ferrante-fever/

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/03/leave-elena-ferrante-alone.html?mid=fb-share-thecut

http://radioopensource.org/ferrante-fever/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160521

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/writing-is-an-act-of-pride-a-conversation-with-elena-ferrante?mbid=social_facebook

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/elena-ferrante-anonymity-lets-me-concentrate-exclusively-on-writing

And here is her website:

http://elenaferrante.com

We will begin by reading My Brilliant Friend, the first of a series of four novels set in Naples. 

Elena Ferrante is as famous for her decision to remain anonymous as she is for her writing. Nobody knows who she is; she has refused face-to-face interviews, both here and in Italy, leading to a vicious guessing game: Is Elena Ferrante a man? Is she more than one person? Since the question of who  "Elena Ferrante" is finds itself in every discussion of her work, I'd like you to reflect on your own ideas of authorship before you begin reading her work. Is it a persona carefully constructed through a book or a series of books? A person we imagine as we read?

From a historical perspective, the author is a modern invention: literary works were transcribed from oral legends passed down through generations, altered so many times in the telling that no one could trace it to a single source.  The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, Beowulf will suffice as examples. This changed with the advent of the novel and the development of print culture, which gave birth to the author. This celebrated person, however, was almost always male.  When women published, they did so anonymously or used a male pseudonym. (The first novel in France was published anonymously by a woman whom we later learned was Madame de Lafayette). Women writers did not come into their own until the twentieth century, when they began to use fiction to search for their voice. Their quest for their authority coincided with male writers' discovery of the "death of the subject," when, under the sway of Roland Barthes and Foucault, male writers were finding freedom in practices of writing that liberated the author from claims to authority or knowledge….Just as women were beginning to discover their authority, the author was declared dead.

Where do we position Elena Ferrante in light of these historical shifts? On one hand, she has returned to a premodern model, embracing the freedom of anonymity in gender-specific ways that recall Virginia Woolf's views in A Room of One's Own. On the other hand, her writing is very much grounded in this digital age, in which authorship has become a collective yet intensely personal enterprise. 

As an "author function" Elena Ferrante marks a new development in the history of women's writing.

Foucault on the author function' from "What is an Author?" (1969)

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Foucault-AuthorFunction.html