Studies in Film History: Screen Adaptations of Elena Ferrante’s Novels

Cross listed with ITAL 3430-01 and WGST 3005-02

Italian author Elena Ferrante has become a global literary phenomenon with her “Neapolitan Novels,” a four-book series that has sold over sixteen million copies worldwide—an extraordinary commercial success for an anonymous author in translation. In December 2024, The New York Times named Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, thefirst book in the series, the best book of the century. All of Ferrante’s novels have been adapted for the screen, resulting in three feature-length films and two television series. In this course, we’ll explore #FerranteFever—the term often used to describe Ferrante’s global success—and analyze three of her novels alongside their screen adaptations: Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, and the first season of the HBO/RAI television series My Brilliant Friend. After examining each novel, we’ll turn to its adaptation through the lens of adaptation theory, drawing on various approaches, including the notion of “queer adaptation—as outlined by Pamela Demory. Our focus will be on the films’ “expressive self-sufficiency”—their ability to convey meaning through the aesthetics of the cinema—rather than on their fidelity to the literary sources.