A espectropoética de Elena Ferrante em Um amor incômodo, Dias de abandono e A filha perdida

Abstract

This thesis examines the presence of specters and the application of spectropoetics in the work of Elena Ferrante, with a focus on the novels Troubling Love (1992), The Days of Abandonment (2002), and The Lost Daughter (2006). These works, collected under the title Chronicles of Heartbreak, inaugurate the author's literary project and are examined in light of the concept of specter developed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994). The investigation is based on the hypothesis that the specters that permeate these narratives – absent figures, disturbing presences, displaced bodies, and lingering voices – act as manifestations of trauma, memory, heritage, and female subjectivity in crisis. The central objective is to understand how these spectral elements articulate in the construction of a poetics that tensions the representation of the female experience, especially in the relationships between mothers and daughters, in the body, and motherhood. The methodology adopted is qualitative and analytical, grounded in a comparative and interdisciplinary approach that integrates literary studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. The textual analysis is conducted considering the theories of Derrida (1994), Julia Kristeva (1982), Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault (2013), and other feminist authors such as Adrienne Rich (1995), Luce Irigaray (2017), Hélène Cixous (2022), and Judith Butler (2019; 2021). The results indicate that Ferrante uses spectrality not only as an aesthetic resource but also as a critical and ethical strategy to deconstruct patriarchal models of representation. The novels' protagonists are haunted by dead or absent mothers, abandoned daughters, and men who abandon; they carry in their bodies and discourses the marks of a traumatic affective and symbolic legacy. In this way, the specter emerges as a literary category capable of exposing the tensions between presence and absence, visible and invisible, past and future, composing a poetics of destabilization and resistance. We conclude that Ferrantian spectropoetics constitutes a mode of writing that rejects linearity, the unity of the subject, and linguistic stability. Instead, it proposes a literature operating through ruins, traces, borderline and unstable zones, reflecting the multiple layers of female subjectivity.