Talk Description: Naples as the prominent setting of Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels has acquired a cult status, spawning myriad studies, travel guides, walking tours, websites, and photo essays. Yet, Elena Greco, the narrator of the Neapolitan Novels narrates not from Naples, but from Turin. Turin thus provides the narrative frame for the entire Quartet. But virtually no attention has been paid to this Northern Italian city which stands in opposition to Naples, culturally and geographically. In this talk I examine Turin as the urban environment of Ferrante’s second novel, The Days of Abandonment (2002), and of Roberto Faenza’s 2005 eponymous film adaptation of it. As the protagonist Olga walks around Turin, she negotiates not only her identity as a woman, mother, and wife, but also a hostile masculinist cityscape that oppresses her body and psyche.

Speaker Bio: Stiliana Milkova is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and of numerous articles on Elena Ferrante as well as on Russian and Bulgarian literatures. She translates from Italian into English and edits the online journal Reading in Translation.