Elena Ferrante

In “The Elenic Question,” published in the blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016, Merve Emre and Len Gutkin argue that the public debate around the mystery of the novelist Elena Ferrante’s identity was critically generative: the parallel “Homeric question” about Homer’s identity raises questions about “oral-formulaic composition (the process by which oral poets improvised poetry) and textual reception (how that improvised poetry was circulated through writing).”

Emre argued in the New York Times Magazine in October 2018 that Ferrante’s practice of anonymity is an “expressive strategy” that can “multiply and muddle the distinct egos of the author: Elena as the writer of the Neapolitan novels; Elena as their first-person narrator; Elena as a commentator on the novels she has written.” Here, the author is a set of critical questions as well as an actual person. If you train a machine to recognize the textual traces of an “actual person,” what becomes of the critical questions about authorship?