This chapter explores Elena Ferrante’s use of Virgil’s Dido as a model for Elena and Lila, the two protagonists of the Neapolitan Novels, through the lens of absence. Not only is Ferrante able to conjure and comment on the Aeneid’s treatment of one of its most divisive characters following the classical rules of intertextual engagement with the ghosts of masterpieces past; she ends up changing the whole game. By teasing narrative material out of Virgil’s silences in Dido’s story-arch, Ferrante centres and requalifies the very reason of Dido’s undoing – the trauma which stems from the loss of love – as the generative force behind both Elena’s and her own literary output. However, by making Lila’s invisible writing and her subsequent disappearance into the beating heart of Elena’s writing, Ferrante uses Virgil as her Muse to stage a woman-centred takeover of literary greatness. Elena’s anxieties over how much of Lila’s life she has truly cannibalized, and her responsibility in Lila’s disappearance, not only take Virgil to task for hiding his Muse, but suggest an alternative model of criticism; moving beyond the postmodern view of the absent author and his unaccountability by giving agency back to the Muse.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

We find ourselves in a paradigmatic transition which we may designate as a postmodern transition, and to account for its emancipatory potential adequately we need an appropriate postmodern theory that I call theory of oppositional postmodernism. According to this theory, it is possible and necessary to think of social regulation and emancipation beyond the limits imposed by the paradigm of modernity. To accomplish it, an oppositional postmodern theory of science and an oppositional postmodern theory of law are called for. This stance takes the promises of modernity very seriously, be they liberty, equality and fraternity. It submits them to a radical critique that allows us to understand the perversities concerning the fulfillment of some of the promises and the impossibility of fulfilling others and it allows us to identify the emancipatory potential that the promises keep intact but that can only be realized within postmodern social, cultural, political, epistemological, and theoretical boundaries. The promises of modernity have become problems for which there seems to be no solution at all. In the meantime, the conditions that brought about the crisis of modernity have not yet become the conditions to overcome the crisis beyond modernity. Hence the complexity of our transitional period: we are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. The search for a postmodern solution is what I call oppositional postmodernism.

Chapter 10 introduces the “postmodern” conception of local citizenship. On this view, the city is a “fortuitous association” where people come together in all of their differences, and where members of marginalized groups exercise a form of citizenship by appearing in public and challenging their formal exclusion from political power. Unlike the republican idea, postmodern citizenship rejects walls and rejects the idea that the city should isolate itself from the world; it is open and borderless. Yet, for that very reason, postmodern citizenship is necessarily fragile and ephemeral. A borderless city risks diluting the normative subgroups that make it possible to tolerate the impersonality and anonymity of the city; if they lose their ability to withdraw into their subgroups, people may flee the city entirely for ethnically and racially homogenous suburbs.