My Brilliant Friend

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What was Italy’s role in World War II? How did the nation’s role impact the country in the years following the war? How was life for women in Italy different from that of men during the 1950s and ’60s?   

Teaching Suggestion: This question introduces the novel’s time period and allows students to connect to prior historical knowledge about Italy’s alignment with the Axis Powers during World War II. While students may not be familiar with the specifics of the feminist movement in Italy, they might be prompted to start with the more familiar history of women’s rights in America and predict what the movement may have looked like in other countries like Italy. The context built by this question will help students understand Ferrante’s novel under feminist and historical lenses.  

• “The Historical Truth Behind Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels” in TIME Magazine evaluates the book’s historical context surrounding Naples in commentary from Dr. Paola Gambarota, a professor at Rutgers University. The article also includes photos of people and places of Naples during the time period in which the book is set.
• This National Geographic article on Naples overviews the city’s core features, offering insight into the city’s long history and historical significance to Italy. This resource will help students contextualize the novel’s setting of Naples within Italy’s culture as a whole.
• This article from POLITICO provides a glimpse of Italy’s contemporary politics surrounding women’s representation and legal rights, offering insight into the cultural perception of gender equality in Italy. This resource offers students context for making connections to themes about women and power in the novel.

2. What is a “dialect”? What makes it different from a language? How do dialects arise? How does someone’s mode of speaking change depending on setting and situation?

Teaching Suggestion: Students may be prompted to consider dialects in their own language—for example, what do they know about American English or other English dialects? They may also be prompted to reflect on how they change their mode of speaking depending on the context of the situation—for example, they likely speak differently to close friends than they would in a professional setting. The following resources offer context on subtleties between dialect and language and the cultural roles they play; these and similar resources may help students to recognize and analyze the motif of standardized Italian versus Neapolitan dialect as a mode of expression in the novel.  

• “What’s A Language, Anyway?” from The Atlantic discusses the nuances between dialect and language and analyzes the difficulty in defining each. (Registration may be needed to view.)
• “A Brief History of the United States’s Accents and Dialects” from the Smithsonian Magazine explores these terms in context of American English dialects, which may be a good entry point for students to conceptualize dialect and the role it plays in their own lives as a mode of expression. This resource also includes an interactive map of United States dialects.
• “The Hidden Meaning Behind My Brilliant Friend’s Neapolitan Dialect” by Justin Davidson for Vulture analyzes the use of Neapolitan dialect in HBO’s television adaptation of My Brilliant Friend. While the original text of the novel is written in standardized Italian and does not include dialect, the director of the television series chose to film the show in the Neapolitan language with Italian subtitles. (Neapolitan is not mutually intelligible to Italian speakers.) The article explains the intricacies of the Neapolitan dialect and analyzes how the director’s choice drives characterization and indications of class in the series. This resource offers English-speaking audiences insight into how dialect functions as a mode of expression, preparing students to analyze the role of dialect versus standardized Italian in the novel. The article also includes clips from the TV series, with English subtitles, that will allow students to hear the difference between Italian and Neapolitan.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

Reflect on your environment growing up. What kinds of relationships or places influenced your growth and ideas? How did positive or negative experiences in your environment shape you into the person you are today?

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt can be used as an entry point into the role of setting in the text. After considering the power of our environments in influencing our growth, students might make predictions on the role that setting can play in coming-of-age novels like My Brilliant Friend. This prompt may also be used to transition into a discussion of the power of storytelling to claim power over our experiences, preparing students to analyze the framing of the novel and its personal, intimate style.  

• “The Remarkable Cult of Elena Ferrante” by Clare Thorpe for BBC examines the following Ferrante’s extraordinarily intimate writing style has spawned, known as “Ferrante Fever.” This article offers an opportunity to understand the cultural impact of Ferrante and My Brilliant Friend and its resonance among women in particular.  
• “The Elena Ferrante in My Head,” an article for the Paris Review by author and English professor Katherine Hill, examines concepts of authorship and anonymity in the Neapolitan novels as “autofiction,” fiction directly drawn from an author’s personal experiences. This resource can be used to introduce concepts of authorship and prepare students to engage with the novel’s framing as a chronicle or memoir.
• “Elena Ferrante’s Naples” is a photo essay for The Guardian by Sophia Seymour, a journalistic photographer and Ferrante enthusiast who has created her own company offering tours of places around Naples with connections to the Neapolitan novels. This photo essay explores the Luzzatti neighborhood outside Naples, thought by many to be the inspiration for the neighborhood in the novel.