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Reading Group

Seminar: Nicholas Birns, Elena Ferrante (session 2 of 4) - Fully Registered

Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - 11:00 AM | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $50 for all four sessions (recommended); $15 per session

Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan series” is considered one of contemporary world literature’s great masterpieces. Beginning in the years after World War II, Ferrante invites us to follow two girls from a poor neighborhood in Naples whose divergent and yet overlapping lives will lead us through 60 years and into our century. We will especially examine the novels’ two main characters—the almost magical Lila and her biographer Elena, their strange and powerful relationship, and their separate stories of love, loss, triumph, despair, and resilience as they articulate the changing lives of modern women. We will also explore the Neapolitan setting, which is not only impoverished and entangled in Mafioso intrigues, but also beautiful and emotionally electric; additionally, we will address the larger Italian setting, which brings with it erudite references to classical works of literature and a cosmopolitan sophistication. Finally, the novels will give us the opportunity to reflect on the extraordinary changes affecting Italy and indeed the entire world in the last half of the 20th century.

Participants will read the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante:

My Brilliant Friend
The Story of a New Name
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The Story of the Lost Child

Copies of the books for discussion are available for registrants to purchase.

This seminar takes places Tuesdays
September 27
October 25
November 29, and
December 20.

Click here for registration instructions.