Adapting Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend for television: Faithfulness and authenticity

My Brilliant Friend (MBF) is a television adaptation of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. This study focuses on the first season of the series, which transposes L’amica geniale, the first of four novels. Our goal is to go beyond traditional comparisons between source texts and adaptations to explore the discourse on the production and development of MBF. We collected and analyzed newspaper and magazine articles, YouTube interviews, and studies that focus on the adaptation of L’amica geniale. Drawing on this corpus, we use discourse analysis to interrogate the two concepts that inform discussions on the artistic and cultural value of this adaptation: faithfulness and authenticity. Far from being unproblematic, these interrelated concepts are ambiguous and elusive because they are entangled with their semantic opposites. The quest for faithfulness clashes with the transformations that occur when adjusting a source text to the affordances of another medium. Similarly, the authentic and the inauthentic are frequently intermingled. Viewers might believe that they are experiencing the ‘real’ until they discern that the real was, in fact, staged.

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Work Title Adapting Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend for television: Faithfulness and authenticity
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Kaila Heltzel
  2. Massimo Verzella
Keyword
  1. Adaptation
  2. Authenticity
  3. Faithfulness
  4. Television
  5. Translation
  6. Discourse
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies
Publication Date December 6, 2023
Subject
  1. Adaptation
  2. Television studies
Language
  1. English
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231215038
Deposited February 21, 2024

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Version 1
published

  • Created
  • Updated
  • Added Creator Massimo Verzella
  • Added Creator Kaila Marie Heltzel
  • Added heltzel-verzella-2023-my-brilliant-friend-for-television.pdf
  • Updated Keyword, Publisher, License Show Changes
    Keyword
    • adaptation, authenticity, faithfulness, television, translation
    Publisher
    • television
    License
    • https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
  • Published
  • Updated

Version 2
published

  • Created
  • Updated Subject, Related URLs Show Changes
    Subject
    • Adaptation, Television studies
    Related URLs
    • https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00145858231215038
  • Published
  • Updated

Version 3
published

  • Created
  • Updated Language Show Changes
    Language
    • English
  • Published
  • Updated Keyword, Publisher, Publisher Identifier (DOI), and 3 more Show Changes
    Keyword
    • adaptation, authenticity, faithfulness, television, translation
    • Adaptation, Authenticity, Faithfulness, Television, Translation, Discourse
    Publisher
    • television
    • Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies
    Publisher Identifier (DOI)
    • https://doi.org/10.1177/00145858231215038
    Description
    • My Brilliant Friend (MBF) is a television adaptation of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. This study focuses on the first season of the series, which transposes L’amica geniale, the first of four novels. Our goal is to go beyond traditional comparisons between source texts and adaptations to explore the discourse on the production and development of MBF. We collected and analyzed newspaper and magazine articles, YouTube interviews, and studies that focus on the adaptation of L’amica geniale. Drawing on this corpus, we use discourse analysis to interrogate the two concepts that inform discussions on the artistic and cultural value of this adaptation: faithfulness and authenticity. Far from being unproblematic, these interrelated concepts are ambiguous and elusive because they are entangled with their semantic opposites. The quest for faithfulness clashes with the transformations that occur when adjusting a source text to the affordances of another medium. Similarly, the authentic and the inauthentic are frequently intermingled. Viewers might believe that they are experiencing the ‘real’ until they discern that the real was, in fact, staged.
    • _My Brilliant Friend_ (MBF) is a television adaptation of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. This study focuses on the first season of the series, which transposes _L’amica geniale_, the first of four novels. Our goal is to go beyond traditional comparisons between source texts and adaptations to explore the discourse on the production and development of MBF. We collected and analyzed newspaper and magazine articles, YouTube interviews, and studies that focus on the adaptation of _L’amica geniale_. Drawing on this corpus, we use discourse analysis to interrogate the two concepts that inform discussions on the artistic and cultural value of this adaptation: faithfulness and authenticity. Far from being unproblematic, these interrelated concepts are ambiguous and elusive because they are entangled with their semantic opposites. The quest for faithfulness clashes with the transformations that occur when adjusting a source text to the affordances of another medium. Similarly, the authentic and the inauthentic are frequently intermingled. Viewers might believe that they are experiencing the ‘real’ until they discern that the real was, in fact, staged.
    Related URLs
    • https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00145858231215038
    Publication Date
    • 2023-12
    • 2023-12-06
  • Updated Creator Massimo Verzella
  • Renamed Creator Kaila Heltzel Show Changes
    • Kaila Marie Heltzel
    • Kaila Heltzel
  • Updated