New Approaches to Literature, Globalized Narrative Strategies and Skills

What is the role of literature in our lives? This question is critical today if we consider how the Internet and the innumerable social networks are affecting the way we think and behave. Perhaps we should start by examining the importance of narration in our everyday experience in order to highlight the active part it plays in creating our individual perception of reality and, above all, of our evolving sense of Self. The present essay aims at analysing the relationships and interactions between narration and personal identity, between narrative and life, literature and globalization. The New Italian Epic movement is also taken into consideration as the latest example (originating on the Web) of a different kind of approach to literature, which aims at developing new meanings and the ethical implications of the literary processes and of phenomena such as intertextuality or web narrative discourse. The main aim of this theoretical and, at the same time, practical approach, with its positive experimentalism, is to define the nature of contemporary literature and, in so doing, to examine ways of overcoming the stagnation of Postmodernism from an openly intercultural point of view.