YOUTH LITERATURE BETWEEN PRINT AND DIGITAL

THE MEDIA METAPHOR IN TODOS CONTRA DANTE

Abstract

In the digital age in which we live, literary texts are crossed by a series of media and technical objects that give them a new form and discourse. As a result, literature is situated in a context of transmedia, intermedia, and multicursive narratives brought about by the contact and intersection of new digital technologies. Not only has cybertext changed the way readers engage with written narratives, but it has also had an enormous impact on print media, providing writers with new creative tools while inheriting reading practices cultivated over more than five centuries of print tradition. In this context, how does youth literature integrate elements of electronic literature into a text for young people? With this question in mind, this article analyzes the novel Todos Contra Dante by the Brazilian writer Luís Dill as an ergodic textuality that, in its graphic and pictorial design, emulates the technical media of the computer and the formatting language of the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) protocol. Methodologically, we examined the corpus for the use of elements that seek to represent the digital media of the Web, as well as the graphic choices of formatting and the use of type in the composition of chapters of the text. Our reading hypothesis was the consolidation of a media metaphor between print and digital materiality as an articulation of the theme of cyberbullying. In the end, we concluded that the materiality studied emulates hypertextuality verbally, providing a poetics that evokes the mechanisms of digital culture, and visually, creating a metaphor between the book and the computer.