La scrittura impegnata tra intertestualità e nuovi media. Il caso Roberto Saviano

The new media are opening new horizons for the experimentation in literature and for reaching a broader public.The opportunity of a multimedia diffusion results particularly appealing to authors intending to communicate a strong message, especially with a social or civic character. Therefore, “engaged literature” presents a marked attitude to multimediality. Moreover, this genre is generally based on journalistic and judicial styles and texts,thus placing itself at the center of a complex intertextual network. On the one hand, journalistic and judicial texts are referenced and re–elaborated in literary texts; onthe other hand, literary texts are in turn diffused through various channels (e.g. through the web, social networks, radio broadcasts) and they become the subject of a number of intersemiotic translations (e.g. from novel to film, to TV fiction, to songs).The integration of different textual genres and of different expression substances often makes it difficult to recognize and define the literary character of a new generation of deeply intertextual and multimedia engaged texts. This paper presents reflections on the complex status of engaged literature in relation to the new media, and it focuses on a case study, i.e. one of the most famous and controversial Italian engaged novels of the last ten years: Gomorra by Roberto Saviano. Herein, we will not take a stance in the debate about “what is literature,” but we will provide some semiotic considerations on the reasons and the consequences of the uncertain epistemic and aesthetic status of contemporary engaged literature.