Alternative di realtà. La rappresentazione dei media digitali nella narrativa italiana contemporanea

The digital revolution, as the culmination of a profound anthropological and cultural transformation, has reshaped the literary field and the balance of forces that constitute it. In an age defined by remediation and convergence, literature has become part of a fluid, interconnected media ecosystem that has diminished its autonomy and social prestige while simultaneously incorporating it into a new discursive and creative regime. From this perspective, the first question to be addressed is whether, and to what extent, literature has actually been relegated to the margins of entertainment and the cultural industries, or whether, rather, the modes and forms through which it exerts its influence have changed as it adapts to a scenario that is, in many respects, unprecedented. Against this backdrop, this research examines literary production that most explicitly reflects the transformations of the contemporary media landscape, with the aim of contributing to a redefinition of the contemporary literary imaginary and, consequently, of reconstructing the social perception of the present, to which literary texts give voice. The central concern of this study is to investigate how the effects of the digital revolution shape the contents and formal features of the literary works that represent them. After delineating the field of so-called “intermedial narrative”—that is, fictional narrative that thematizes digital media—the study undertakes a thematic and stylistic analysis of the novels most representative of this category. The analysis thus reveals a body of literary production that reflects, to varying degrees, a pervasive sense of uncertainty, first and foremost ontological, that characterizes contemporary reality.