Reading and literature in digital media: forms and types

Abstract

The transposition of the text from the printed medium to the screen, that is, the advent of an electronic textuality, has brought us an instigating opportunity to rethink fundamental ideas about text and literary doing. Thus, the article intends to briefly demonstrate some of the peculiarities emerged by the relationship between literature and digital technology, highlighting the need to review current reading practices and the new strategies elicited by the forms and genres that originate from this context. Thus, we highlight in the article some of the new genres that emerge from the so-called electronic literature and reflect on the modes and strategies of reading that such genres in some cases even impose to the reader, highlighting that these strategies and modes can find, initially, the reading in printed medium as initial support. For this, support is sought in thinkers such as Katheryne Hayles (2001, 2003, 2009), Roger Chatier (2001), Wolfgang Iser (1996), Castanyer (2001) and Lúcia Santaella (2004). Finally, we affirm that the dissimilarities between digital and printed texts do not serve to qualify one and the other as better, but rather to reinforce their differences and to signal the need to use alternative reading strategies when in contact with texts in different supports.