“An Educated Identity”: The School as a Modernist Chronotope in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Abstract

This chapter explores the contrast between the school and the neighborhood as the primary symbolic, ideological, and embodied narrative dichotomy of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. This salient opposition operates as a metonym and metaphor for a series of other binaries characteristic of the “totalizing category” (Keane 47) of post-World War II modernity. In this sense, the school/neighborhood dichotomy in the Neapolitan Novels can be understood as the primary motif of the “modernist chronotope” (Dick). Love argues that despite the attempts of the projects of modernity to discursively create a stark separation between the past and the present, the Neapolitan Novels provide an alternative narrative that describes the fluid, dynamic movements from one chronotopic domain to another.

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