Italian Transmedia Culture: Stories and Storytelling Across Media by Emanuela Patti

On the occasion of the last SIS Biennial Conference (Durham, 7-11 July), I organized a panel entitled “Italian transmedia culture: stories and storytelling across media” which included papers presented by Marco Amici (Cork), Emanuela Piga (Cagliari), Marina Guglielmi (Cagliari), Giulio Iacoli (Parma), Ilaria Masenga (Exeter) and myself. The panel aimed to investigate Italian storytelling across media, with a special focus on how new media technologies have fundamentally changed our methods of story constructions and modes of reception. One of the most remarkable experiences emerging from the convergence of old and new media is indeed “transmedia storytelling” (Jenkins 2007). As a result, this new medial hybridity has challenged the classical concepts of adaptation and intertextuality usually employed in literary and film studies. It has also reinforced the need for a rethinking of the boundaries of fictionality, genre, authorship and identity in relation to new technologies. The main topics addressed were new narrative practices across media and how older forms were extended (narrative interaction, multimodality, remediation of genres across media), authorship (dispersed authorship, co-creation, fan fiction, collective authorship), reception/participation of audiences (from traditional audiences to social networks, cultural production and communities). Papers looked at forms of cross-fertilisation between textual, pictorial, graphic and audio-visual mediality Italian literature, cinema, audio-visual and performative arts have responded to transmediality and how digital imaginaries shape and relate to our way of narrating ourselves and our creative practices.

I introduced the panel and the first session, Literature across borders, with the paper Dalla Galassia Gutenberg alla Galassia Internet: storie e narrazioni transmediali attraverso i media which mapped the development of media transmedia narratives in XXI century Italian fiction from Wu Ming to Scrittura Industriale Collettiva. In the next paper, Transmedia and Genre Narrative: Some Observations on United We Stand by Simone Sarasso and Daniele Rudoni, Marco Amici focused on a specific case study to investigate the new digital genre of net graphic novel and how this enacts a multimodal representation between fiction and history. In the third paper, La comunità convergente: memorie condivise e narrazioni in rete, Emanuela Piga examined the transmedial extension of the novel Manituana by Wu Ming and the role of communities around the collective’s blog Giap, looking at the conceptual relationship between “open work” and “open source”. The second session, Rethinking Adaptation and Reception in the Era of Convergence Culture, started with Marina Guglielmi’s paper on the reception of classics in Walt Disney comics and fan-fictions. In the second paper, Mariposas in volo: analisi spaziale di un adattamento, da Sergio Atzeni a Salvatore Mereu, Giulio Iacoli examined practices of intermediality between Sergio Atzeni’s novel and Salvatore Mereu’s film, focusing on the visual translation of space and the narrator. Finally, Ilaria Masenga’s paper, Coming of Age in the Social Media Era: Literature, Readership and Fandom in Contemporary Italy, explored readers’ response and fandom in Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Facebook fan page. The following debate was lively and stimulating addressing questions like power and representation, new media and ideologies, communities and collective identity.