(Cross listed with WGST 3005 and ITAL 3430)

Italian author Elena Ferrante has become a global literary phenomenon with her tetralogy commonly known as The Neapolitan Novels, which have sold nearly two million copies in North America, making them a rare commercial blockbuster from an anonymous author in translation. Following this enormous success, the first book of the series was adapted into an eight-episode TV series, which was co-produced by HBO and the Italian public broadcasting service RAI and was aired both in the USA and in Italy in fall 2018; a second season followed in 2020. Two earlier stand-alone novels by Ferrante, Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment, also became films.

In this course, we will learn about #FerranteFever, as Ferrante’s global success is commonly referred to; we will read and discuss Ferrante’s novels; and will analyze the two films and the TV series adapted from Ferrante’s works. We will discuss gender and queerness in conjunction with theories and practice of adaptation. Both adaptation and queerness suffer from the stereotype of being secondary. To identify something as an adaptation is to recognize it in relation to something else that seems more original, more authentic. Similarly, to identify something as queer is to place it in relation to what is assumed to be “normal” or “straight.” One of our goals in this class is to discuss whether and how the Ferrante adaptations have (de)queered their sources.