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An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

theatlantic.com

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Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#41

Post by Veen »

lostjohnny wrote: post #39
krapp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every famous author is a "product", it doesn't make them any less real. JK Rowling has a much bigger marketing machine around her, for instance, but it would be wrong to claim that she, or her books, aren't worth mentioning in a discussion about Harry Potter, only Bloomsbury and Warner Bros.

That's where the confusion kicks in. I'm sure in good faith you believe Elena Ferrante is a woman, but we don't even know if the books have been written by a single person or if each book has a single author... It's an interesting marketing phenomenon nonetheless, but we are not looking, IMHO, at someone writing under a pseudonym for personal reasons. We are looking at the absence as a marketing tool, that amplifies…

It’s interesting to think about whether it really matters. The text is the same either way. If you judge a book on the words on the page, it doesn’t matter much how they came to be there, so criticising ‘her’ work on different factors seems irrelevant.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#42

Post by SiempreViernes »

keiferski wrote: post #14

I don't blame any writer for wanting to be anonymous. In today's world, your race, gender, sexual orientation, age, hair color, clothing style, political affiliation, birthplace, and any other discernible group identity will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity. To quote from Ferrante's Wikipedia page: Ferrante holds that "books, once they are written, have no n…

The only thing that has really changed is that now more combinations of ``race'', gender, sexual orientation, age etc are heard, and that the canonical tuple is being criticised.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#43

Post by Veen »

superflyguy wrote: post #28
sn41 wrote: post #20

Why is there such a complaint? Anonymity is a privilege of the author, isn't it? There are authors who remain anonymous even to this day, one I know is B. Traven, the author of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The precise authorship of individual articles in the Federalist papers is unknown. Also, I believe, if you really want to go that far back, the author of Ecclesiastes is not identified. And then there are know…

Salinger has certainly got this reclusive business down to a t - nobody's seen or heard anything from him for a good 8 years now.

It’s easier to avoid appearing in public when you’re dead.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#44

Post by pjc50 »

keiferski wrote: post #14

I don't blame any writer for wanting to be anonymous. In today's world, your race, gender, sexual orientation, age, hair color, clothing style, political affiliation, birthplace, and any other discernible group identity will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity. To quote from Ferrante's Wikipedia page: Ferrante holds that "books, once they are written, have no n…

Whereas in the past, all books(+) were written by white guys, plus a few women writing under male pseudonyms; and this situation was called "not political". Writing books about non-straight sexual orientation was simply banned - or, up to the famous Lady Chatterly trial, any sex at all. The last police raid on queer fiction in the UK was on "Gays the word" in 1984. I believe there are still incidents in the US and other places where angry parents try to get books banned from school libraries.

(+) to a first approximation, in the canon of western literary fiction, up to about the 1960s-70s

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#45

Post by SiempreViernes »

icebraining wrote: post #37
samastur wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a list of influential people, not most famous. Knowing who they are I'd say you could reasonably put both on such list.

What's Nikki Haley's influence on the world?

Being the US representative to the UN, I imagine she helped delay action on climate change and things like that.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#46

Post by onlydeadheroes »

marchenko wrote: post #31
onlydeadheroes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like marketing to me, nothing more. from the article: "global superstar" I guess the bar has been lowered past the floor now.

She's a legitimate global superstar in fiction writing. Her books are popular enough to move the percentage of total book sales represented by translated fiction in English-speaking markets (she` writes in Italian). Strangely enough, her approach is often considered a kind of anti-marketing: no book tours, few interviews, strangely downscale cover art - people, mostly women, just really love her writing.

I guessed I stepped on the wrong narrative because just questioning this author's superstardom has gotten me to -4 on a mostly male site where most people can't even downvote. I have no opinion on this author, but can we please stop pushing everything like it is the second coming of christ just because women like it?

As I said, marketing.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#47

Post by wkearney99 »

What was that George Burns joke?

Sincerity is everything, learn to fake that and you've got it made.

So is this an extension, destroy the value of sincerity/authenticity instead?

The letter seems like little more than a pretty intense bout of literary critic navel-gazing.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#48

Post by icebraining »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #45
icebraining wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's Nikki Haley's influence on the world?

Being the US representative to the UN, I imagine she helped delay action on climate change and things like that.

She's only been the ambassador to the UN since 2017, yet she appears in the 2016 list.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#49

Post by lostjohnny »

Veen wrote: post #41
lostjohnny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where the confusion kicks in. I'm sure in good faith you believe Elena Ferrante is a woman, but we don't even know if the books have been written by a single person or if each book has a single author... It's an interesting marketing phenomenon nonetheless, but we are not looking, IMHO, at someone writing under a pseudonym for personal reasons. We are looking at the absence as a marketing tool, that amplifies…

It’s interesting to think about whether it really matters. The text is the same either way. If you judge a book on the words on the page, it doesn’t matter much how they came to be there, so criticising ‘her’ work on different factors seems irrelevant.

That's my point.

We should talk about the books and not about anything else.

My first answer was to someone who wrote, and I quote

> I don't blame any writer for wanting to be anonymous. In today's world, your race, gender, sexual orientation, age, hair color, clothing style, political affiliation, birthplace, and any other discernible group identity will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity.

There's no evidence that this is the case, in fact the evidence point to the exact opposite direction.

Re: An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

#50

Post by tomchristie »

Authorship is always both an individual and a collective act of creativity. We've millenia of shared culture poured into us. Similarly the interplay between the feminine and the masculine voice: Each can only exists in contrast to the other, and we all have elements of both voices within.

"Et nous sommes encor tout mêlés l’un à l’autre"

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