Coda: Formation and Disintegration in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend

This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the transformation of biographical forms with the advent of the digital curation of selfhood and the persistence of the novel as evidenced by wildly successful global fiction centrally concerned with education. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011) depicts educational institutions as alienating and exclusionary on the bases of class and gender. Despite these limitations, however, education functions as a necessary mechanism of social mobility, intellectual and aesthetic development, and emotional insight. In her double bildungsroman, I suggest following Lukacs, Ferrante demonstrates both the necessity and futility of the form-giving novelistic imagination. In so doing, she somehow speaks to over 15 million readers in 45 languages. How might we reconcile beliefs about the disposability of the humanities with the continued hunger for the lessons of the novel? As quaint as these entry points might seem, focusing our attention on what the novel has to teach each individual reader about perception, comprehension, and the relationship between the self and the world has become a matter of urgency and an area of incomparable potential.