A team of experts explore the ‘Elena Ferrante case’

(6 September 2017) Elenan Ferrante’s case is one that merits to be studied. Two Professors, Arjuna Tuzzi in Statistics and Michele Cortelazzo in Linguistics, are completing research that aims to place the author within the context of the contemporary Italian narrative, starting from narrative. The aim is to “profile” Elena Ferrante and to understand which authors are most similar to, the similarities her writing style has with other female authors, and how strong her connection to authors from Naples is. Secondary to the main objective is also the mystery of who lies behind the pseudonym “Elena Ferrante”. In order toa hieve their goals, the two Professors have chosen to use the technique called “distant reading”. It is a way of understanding literature through the analysis of large quantities of data not only about the texts themselves but in the contextual information that surrounds them. They have also accompanied this method with the traditional qualitative analysis of the most relevant phenomena thanks to an automatic analysis. In order to do this, they have gathered 150 novels from the last 50 years written by 40 different authors. Good research is transparent, open for discussion, collaboration, and eventually confutation. For this reason, the two scholars from Padua have donated their body of work to the leading scholars of author attribution of different nationalities (an American, two Polish, one French, one Greek, and one Swiss) and with different backgrounds (two computer scientists, a classicist, a translatologist, a pedagogist, and a linguist) who use different methodologies. On Thursday September 7^th, Jacque Savoy (University of Neuchâtel), Jan Rybicki (Jagiellonian University of Krakow), Maciej Eder (Polish Academy of Sciences), Patrick Juola (Duquesne University of Pittsburgh), George Mikors (University of Athens), and Pierre Ratinaud (University of Toulouse II) will present and discuss the results of their research on Elena Ferrante’s works and the respective body of work. The workshop, “Drawing Elena Ferrante’s Profile” will be held at the University of Padua in the Aula Magna of the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy, and Applied Psychology” in via M. Cesarotti 10/12 at 14:30. It will also be live streamed on https://livestream.com/unipd-sdlm/elenafferante. (PO/Red)