Gomorrah By Romeo Saviano Essay

Italian author Roberto Saviano’s ‘Gomorrah’ has sold 2.25 million copies in Italy and 8 million copies around the world. There are some plays, a movie and several TV adaptions from the book; these last ones written and produced by Saviano himself. Honestly, I haven’t read the book, but I feel as if I have already read part of it. Back when it was published (even a few months earlier…), it was impossible not to see it or hear about it everywhere. The author and the book were closely associated and ‘distributed’ by a large diversity of media: the Italian Mafia as its provocative and addictive central topic; the new capos committing their brutally violent acts, plus Saviano’s own life at risk for daring to write such a book portrayed in the media

In this sense, the American critic Camille Paglia says in her relevant work Sexual Personae (1991): “Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the Western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.” (Paglia: 139) What’s more, in Theodor Adorno’s perspective, the fact of ‘consuming’ those movies help the mafia culture, particularly the ‘Camorra’, construct its individuals’

As we see, think or dream about the aesthetic object, we have an emotional reaction to it. It could be positive, negative or mere indifference (which I guess that can’t be very positive then…) But this reaction or reactions (as we may have more than one for one aesthetic object) is/are irrelevant to build a critical theory of Popular Culture, since these reactions are completely subjective. Lady Gaga has a horde of fans who adores her, but also a very long line of haters, and then, a big bunch of people who don´t have a strong opinion about Lady Gaga at all …. Roger B. Rollin suggests that Popular Culture scholars center themselves on the description and interpretation of the aesthetic object. Keeping in mind Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘producerly’ text, the idea of popular culture as being per se full of contradictions, and speaking “differently in different contexts, in different moments of reading” (Fiske 126), ‘illumination’ in the study of popular culture will try, among other things, to find and describe the multiplicity of (new) meanings, functions and effects on groups of people or specific people; to find and describe distortions, lapses, absences and silences; to disambiguate the meanings, and clarify what follows from the removal of ambiguity; to describe and interpret the kinds of relationships an aesthetic object and its audience maintain