ENGL 2925H: Topics: Female friendship

Abstract

The Neapolitan quartet, Elena Ferrante’s series of novels about a friendship between two women who meet as children in Naples, has received extraordinary praise from readers and critics worldwide since its publication between 2011 and 2014. Carole DeSanti, an editor at Viking Press, writes that after reading Ferrante’s novels she “was bursting with the need to talk about them…because they speak to us so intimately, but are also highly social—showing us so many interrelations and co-creations, how we make and un-make one another, find and mirror each other—in all kinds of ways.” ¶The topic of this honors course is fiction that explores this act of co-creation, this making and mirroring that happens between female friends. We will explore female friendship in four relatively contemporary novels from four different countries: Italy, The United States, Hungary, and Canada. (I also ask that you read—or reread—Louisa May Alcott’s classic children’s novel Little Women.) We’ll begin with My Brilliant Friend and use the novel as a touchstone, returning to it for the rest of the term. After My Brilliant Friend, we’ll read Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Magda Szabo’s The Door (1987), and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988). Over Fall break, you’ll also watch the recent HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend. Throughout the semester, we’ll consider how the novel of female friendship works as a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age story. And while female friendship is the central theme, our exploration will take us in all sorts of directions. In reading My Brilliant Friend, for example, we may find ourselves talking about class conflict or ambivalence over maternal roles or the effects of education or the changing status of women in the seventies or about experiments in form and issues of authorship. Requirements for the course include regular reading quizzes, four short reading response letters, and two papers, one 5-7 pages and the last 7-10 pages. No midterm or final exam.