Il caso editoriale Pitigrilli e il romanzo "L’esperimento di Pott" (1929) tra figuratività ed intermedialità

The paper analyzes the novel L’esperimento di Pott (Milano, Sonzogno, 1929) written by Pitigrilli, one of the most famous Italian writers in the period between the two world wars. The writer’s popular and entertaining novels represent, for several reasons, a cultural change in the literary field. The purpose of the paper is to focus on one of this reasons: the ability of a specific literary segment, definable as middlebrow, to conquer the attention and the interest of the media’s public. This attention is conquered through the presence, in the novels, of instances and inspirations belonging to the visual culture of the beginning of the XX century, through the contaminations coming from the advertising, cinematographic and photographic techniques. Furthermore, through the contamination of narrative experiments, inspired by Modernism, which are made accessible, thanks to Pitigrilli’s novels to a broad public. Pitigrilli is one of the most famous exponents of the Italian middlebrow culture and for this reason the intention of the paper is to focus on one of his last and best known novels: L’esperimento di Pott. The paper’s theoretical background moves from the studies of Algirdas Julien Greimas (1984) and Denis Bertrand (2000) concerning the figurativity of the literary text and the studies of Bachtin (1975) and Gaudreault (1998) for the concept of intermediality and the consequent concept of remediation with the theories of Mc Luhan (1964) and Bolter (1999). Moving from this theoretical approach some pieces of the novel L’esperimento di Pott are analyzed. This analysis gives the opportunity to frame Pitigrilli’s narrative production in a process of comparison and tension between middlebrow and highbrow cultural forms and between the literary field and the world of media.