Simon Kienzl

Simon Kienzl was born in Bolzano, Italy, and has been studying Comparative Literature with a minor in Philosophy in Munich since 2016. During his undergraduate studies, he spent a semester abroad at the Università di Pisa. After submitting his master’s thesis, titled ‘Io non ci sto!‘ Resistant writing in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), he worked as a freelance journalist for newspapers until he joined the Family Matters graduate research group in April 2024. The central question that has driven him since his master’s thesis concerns the resistant potential of literature: What can literature achieve between the extremes of complex, inherently or aesthetically resistant texts and widely consumed, bestselling novels such as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels?

Dissertation Project: Teorema and Affabulazione: Family-hi/stories between Benjamin, Pasolini, Ferrante, and Morante

Walter Benjamin, the “ragpicker”, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the “corsair” of philosophy, dedicated their lives and writings to uncovering the overlooked and the a-familial aspects of a history of progress that merely perpetuates itself in an endless “triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.” (Benjamin, Selected Writings 1938-1940, Volume IV, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 391.) Against this “triumphal procession”, which leaves behind nothing but monuments to the ruling, Benjamin—and, as this dissertation posits, Pasolini as well—sought to focus on the neglected and the marginalized that is lying on the ground, identifying in it moments of emancipatory potential within capitalist modernity. The guiding research question of this project is therefore: Given the premise of such a triumphal progression of the ruling classes over the subjugated, how can history be conceived differently from dominant traditions, and how might family narratives serve as a site of resistance against these entrenched and perpetuated structures?

Building on the fundamental assumption of an intrinsic entanglement between theory (Teorema) and fiction (Affabulazione) in the writing of family narratives, this study examines the question at the porous intersection of philosophy and literature. To what extent can – engaging with Walter Benjamin’s and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s philosophical perspectives on (family)-history – (popular) literary family narratives participate in or maybe transcend this process? Moreover, how might the widely read but in the literary studies often overlooked works of authors such as Elena Ferrante and Elsa Morante themselves illuminate and revive unresolved and overlooked potentials within Benjamin’s and Pasolini’s writings?

To explore these questions, this dissertation project will analyze narratives such as Morante’s La Storia and Ferrante’s L’amica geniale – family stories that simultaneously rewrite history. It will trace the interrupted as well as the reactivated threads of Benjamin’s and Pasolini’s critiques of progress, genealogy, and conventional familial structures within these literary texts. The objective of this project is, first, to delineate the dominant logic of the a-familial, as revealed and deconstructed by Benjamin and Pasolini. Ultimately, the study aims—through its analysis—to identify alternative possibilities: not merely to refrain from perpetuating this logic in literature, but to actively contest it, using family narratives to write against the triumphalist history observed by Benjamin.