A Literatura na Era Digital

Abstract

This work aims at answering the following question: “What are the novel’s possibilities today, in these times of immaterial ‘bits’ and digital culture?”To do so, it makes use of a doublecritical strategy: on the one hand,it examinessome answersproposed byliterary critics; on the other, it examines some of Enrique Vila-Matas’ novels, notably Montano’s malady(2002), Never any end to Paris(2003), and Dublinesque(2010), which are immanently considered. In this tense analytic movement, which may recall the construction of a (weak) constellation, the answers provided by critics are confronted with the actual experience of literary construction and the universe of such novels, always in the hope that such a contrast may reveal the dilemmas and problems currently faced by the literary production. Along the way, a complementary but necessary goal emerges: to identify and interpret the various literary modes and procedures these novels resort to in order to draw on their fragile bodies a specifically literary concept about their objective situation in a world that is down right hostile to them. In this perspective, the subject of the deathof literature, comprising different nuances and occupying the foreground, can be interpreted as a social determination to produce the current literary creation, although exploring it so ironically; or rather, as away of building a kind of literary resistance to the competition imposed by the new means of expression coming from sophisticated technological devices for the productionand distribution of images and sounds, a fact that objectively and constantly restrict sreadership. The conclusion,equally not devoid of some irony, points toa freak and anachronistic fact: in today’s society, some dead enjoy good health