CFP “New Global Perspectives on Elena Ferrante” at the 2021 ACLA Convention (April 8-11, 2021)

Dear colleagues, 

please consider submitting an abstract for a seminar on “New Global Perspectives on Elena Ferrante” at the next ACLA Annual Meeting, which will be held online from 8-11 April 2021. Proposals must be submitted by 31 October 2020 on the ACLA website:   

https://acla.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/2/sessiongallery/229  

Organizers: Tiziana De Rogatis (Università per Stranieri di Siena), Stiliana Milkova (Oberlin College), Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Durham University) 

“New Global Perspectives on Elena Ferrante”

The global success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels has firmly established the author as one of the most powerful voices of contemporary World Literature. Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet interweaves an imaginary that is profoundly rooted in Italian – or more specifically, Neapolitan – culture, while also debating issues of globalization as her female protagonists negotiate the tensions between local identity and national and transnational belonging. Departing from this perspective, and from the recent Special Issue Elena Ferrante in a Global Context edited by the seminar organizers Tiziana de Rogatis, Stiliana Milkova and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (forthcoming, MLN, vol. 136, 2021), this seminar aims to further elaborate on some central research questions emerging from recent scholarly debate. The seminar invites contributions on the works of Ferrante and topics that are of relevance on a global scale, including the contemporary transmedial imaginary, the theatre adaptations of the Neapolitan Quartet, the iconotext Incidental Inventions, the dynamics and strategies of translation, gender and transnational reception, the global novel, the narrative forms of “traumatic realism”, the Global South, the new epistemological categories applied to contemporary reality (including new materialism, posthumanism, trans-corporeality), comparative analyses with other contemporary authors, gender roles and feminine identity, urban topography, or language.