Second-Person Narrative and Relational Ethics in Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s Mia madre è un fiume and Ada D’Adamo’s Come d’aria

The article analyses the original use of second-person narrative in two recent novels in Italian: Mia madre è un fiume by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (2011) and Come d’aria by Ada D’Adamo (2023). Both works are concerned with a mother–daughter relationship and its transformation as an effect of illness. The article links Di Pietrantonio’s and D’Adamo’s second-person narratives to notions of relationality and relational ethics, particularly as recently developed by feminist, posthuman, and disability studies, which stress material interdependence and challenge the liberal fantasy of a self-determined sovereign subject. As they voice a desire for connection, these texts also perform the twofold function of bearing testimony, preserving a reality corroded by illness, and of expressing a reparative need for relation in the present. Secondperson narrative, in these works, is a form of presentification, a speech act that performs relationality by summoning the other — the mother, the daughter — here and now.