LITERATURE AS EVENT: GENRE MUTATION, AUTHORIAL BODY, AND TRANSMEDIA IMPACT IN ROBERTO SAVIANO'S GOMORRAH

Abstract

The contemporary cultural milieu of the 21st century has fundamentally altered how literature is produced and consumed, shifting its conceptualization from a static textual object to a dynamic ‘event’. My paper explores this paradigm shift through a detailed case study of Roberto Saviano’s 2006 work, Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System. This study is a part of my broader research project on the literary representation of Naples in our century. By examining Gomorrah and its portrayal of the camorra (the organized crime group active in Naples and the Campania region), this study investigates how contemporary literature strongly ruptures the boundaries between fiction, factual data, and the author's subjective reality. The analysis is structured around three central pillars: the ontological mutation of the literary genre, the paradoxical inverse relationship between the author’s physical visibility and his public credibility, and the power of the literary text—especially when supported by other mass media—to transform and influence the very segment of reality it has depicted. In the volatile transmedia space of the new millennium, literature is no longer a mere reflection of the world, but a powerful, active happening that actively reconstitutes the political agency of the public and reshapes the reality it portrays.