Abstract
Prominent instances of ekphrasis—the literary description of an artwork—play a crucial role in Ferrante’s narratives. This chapter examines Ferrante’s strategic employment of visual images and articulates the role of ekphrasis as a narrative, thematic, and figurative device in Troubling Love, My Brilliant Friend, and The Story of a New Name. . Milkova’s contention is that the ekphrasis of paintings and photographs in Ferrante’s novels operates as a visual metaphor for the patriarchal mechanisms of oppression, violence, and objectification of women. She argues that ekphrasis also allows an exit out of patriarchy and posits woman as an autonomous artist figure who wields creative, constructive power and who can thus resist the dominant order. Ekphrasis constructs and reinforces the patriarchal paradigm but ultimately resists and inverts it from within.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Alsop, Elizabeth. “Femmes Fatales: ‘La Fascinazione di Morte’ in Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto and I giorni dell’abbandono.” Italica (September 22, 2014). Print.
Atwood, Margaret. The Circle Game. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1966. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Print.
Benedetti, Laura. “Il linguaggio dell’amicizia e della città: L’amica geniale di Elena Ferrante tra continuità e cambiamento.” Quaderni d’italianistica, XXXIII:2 (2012): 171-187. Print.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972. Print.
Conti, Eleonora. “Abiti, madri e figlie ne L’amore molesto di Elena Ferrante.” Lettera Zero 1(2015):103-113. Print.
Duncan, Carol. “Virility and Domination in Early-Twentieth Century Vanguard Painting”. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. Eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. Icon Editions, 1982. 292–313. Print.
Elwell, Leslie. Italian Female Epistemologies beyond ‘The Scene of the Crime’. Ph.D. Dissertation. UC Berkeley, 2013. Print.
Ferrante, Elena. L’amore molesto. Roma: Edizioni e/o, 1999. Print.
——. L’amica geniale. Roma: Edizioni e/o, 2011. Print.
——. Storia del nuovo cognome. Roma: Edizioni e/o, 2012. Print.
——. La frantumaglia. Roma: Edizioni e/o, 2003. Print.
——. Troubling Love. New York: Europa Editions, 2006. Print.
——. My Brilliant Friend. New York: Europa Editions, 2012. Print.
——. The Story of a New Name. New York: Europa Editions, 2013. Print.
Giorgio, Adalgisa. “The Passion for the Mother: Conflicts and Idealizations in Contemporary Italian Narrative.” Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women. Ed. Adalgisa, Giorgio. New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2002. 119–154. Print.
Hedley, Jane, Nick Halpern, and Willard Spiegelman, eds. In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler. University of Delaware Press, 2009. Print.
Heffernan, James. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Print.
Irigaray, Luce. “Women on the Market” in Luce Irigaray. This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.
Karagoz, Claudia. Amori molesti: The Mother-Daughter Relationship in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Print.
Keats, John. Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Harvard University Press, 1978. Print.
Lombardi, Giancarlo. “Scambi d’identità: Il recupero del corpo Materno ne L’amore molesto.” Romance Languages Annual 10 (1999): 288–291. Print.
Lucamante, Stefania. A Multitude of Women. The Challenges of the Contemporary Italian Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Print.
Marchais, Nathalie. “Madre o Donna? Figure femminili in conflitto nei romanzi di Elena Ferrante” Ecritures 2 (2006): 45–57. Print.
Milkova, Stiliana. “Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura.” Italian Culture 31:2 (September 2013): 91–109. Print.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekphrasis and the Other” in W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print.
Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists.” Art and Sexual Politics. Eds. Thomas Hess and Elizabeth Baker. New York: Collier Books, 1973. Print.
——, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient” in Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society. Icon Editions, 1991. Print.
Paoli, Federica. “Dell’accettazione e del rifiuto: immagini e figure del materno da Elena Ferrante a Vanessa Ambrosecchio.” Bollettino di Italianistica 2005:2. 159–172. Print.
Rivière, Joan. “Womanliness as Masquerade.” Forms of Fantasy. Eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan. New York: Routledge, 1986. 35–44. Print.
Sambuco, Patrizia. “Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto: The Renegotiation of the Mother’s Body.” Patrizia Sambuco, Corporeal Bonds: The Daughter-Mother Relationship in Twentieth-Century Italian Women’s Writing. University of Toronto Press, 2012. Print.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977. Print.
Spackman, Barbara. “Puntini, puntini, puntini: Motherliness as Masquerade in Sibilla Aleramo’s Una Donna. ” MLN 124:5 (2009): S210–223. Print.
Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print.
Webb, Ruth. “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre.” Word & Image 15 (1999): 7–18. Print.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Milkova, S. (2016). Elena Ferrante’s Visual Poetics: Ekphrasis in Troubling Love, My Brilliant Friend, and The Story of a New Name . In: Russo Bullaro, G., Love, S. (eds) The Works of Elena Ferrante. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57580-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57580-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59062-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57580-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)