Italian Literature Commons^™

Elena Ferrante: A Borderless Identity, Alexander James Hankins

Honors Theses and Capstones

This thesis examines the concept of identity in the works of Elena Ferrante, arguing that her fiction presents identity not as an isolated, self-contained construct, but as something relational, fluid, and deeply shaped by environment. Focusing primarily on The Neapolitan Quartet, the project introduces “boundaries” as a central framework, drawing on relational-cultural theory to explore how identities are formed through connection as much as separation. In Ferrante’s Naples, the setting functions as a microcosm of broader social forces — class disparity, gender inequality, generational tension, and political ideologies — that collectively shape individual experience.

At the core of this analysis …

An Existentialist Interpretation Of Four Novels By Alberto Moravia, Megan Chiusaroli

Honors College Theses

This analysis seeks to explore the existential qualities in four novels by Alberto Moravia: The Time of Indifference, The Woman of Rome, The Conformist, and Boredom

Primo Levi And Bruno Piazza: Auschwitz In Italian Literature, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

To focus on the literature of the Shoah more than 50 years later and 7,000 miles away inevitably creates some sense of dissociation due to both historical and geographic distance. While on the one hand, an analysis of the literature of the genocide might grant further insights through a retrospective look, on the other, however, this distance of time and space risks leading to an oversimplification of the Shoah, in the sense that the plight of the Jews, their individual stories and the overwhelming sense of emptiness caused by the depletion of the intellectual Jewish cultural communities in Europe might …

Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Even though his first book Se questo è un uomo–published in English as Survival in Auschwitz–did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it was accepted unanimously in Italy as a literary masterpiece and a great witness to history when Einaudi republished the volume in 1956. From that moment on, Italian readers and critics have acknowledged the literary beauty and importance of Levi's writings. He …