ABSTRACT

Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’, published in English between 2012 and 2015, tell the coming-of-age story of two women born in a poor neighbourhood in post-war Naples. The international success of this four-part series of novels – named in the Italian edition after the title of the first novel, L’amica geniale (‘My Brilliant Friend’) – testifies to the enduring popularity of the urban poor of Naples as a literary subject. This article discusses several key issues of urban poverty that emerge from the series (i.e. social exclusion, ghettoization, widespread illegality, endemic violence and women’s oppression) and analyses how they are narrated, drawing on two classic texts of ethnographic scholarship: Thomas Belmonte’s The Broken Fountain (1979) and Italo Pardo’s Managing Existence in Naples (1996). In doing so, it reconsiders Ferrante’s narrative from a socio-anthropological perspective and assesses her ‘ethnographic imagination’ vis-à-vis two opposing tendencies in the literature about the urban poor of Naples: one geared towards stigmatization and the other towards romanticization. The article thus argues that the ‘Neapolitan Novels’ offer a refreshing take on a deeply stereotyped subject, countering (at least in part) the process of ‘othering’ that traditionally affects the literary representation of Naples’ urban poor.

摘要

埃琳娜·费兰特 (Elena Ferrante) 于 2012 年至 2015 年间以英文出版的“那不勒斯小说”讲述了两名出生在战后那不勒斯贫困社区的妇女的成长故事。这部由四部分组成的系列小说在国际上取得了成功——在意大利版中以第一部小说的名字命名，L'amica geniale（“我的好朋友”）——证明了那不勒斯城市贫民作为文学主题。本文讨论了该系列中出现的城市贫困的几个关键问题（即社会排斥、贫民窟化、普遍的非法行为、地方性暴力和妇女受压迫），并分析了这些问题的叙述方式，借鉴了民族志学术的两部经典文本：托马斯·贝尔蒙特 (Thomas Belmonte) 的《破碎》(The Broken )喷泉(1979) 和伊塔洛·帕多 (Italo Pardo)管理在那不勒斯的存在（1996 年）。在此过程中，它从社会人类学的角度重新考虑了费兰特的叙述，并评估了她的“民族志想象力”与文学中关于那不勒斯城市贫民的两种相反倾向：一种倾向于污名化，另一种倾向于浪漫化。因此，这篇文章认为，“那不勒斯小说”为一个刻板印象深刻的主题提供了一种令人耳目一新的视角，反对（至少部分地）传统上影响那不勒斯城市贫民的文学表现的“他者化”过程。