Leitores e autores na era da web 2.0: webcomics, narrativas hipertextuais e participação

Abstract

Narratives have been a part of human traditions since the beginning of times. Since Ancient History, in predominantly oral cultures, going through the first written registers and to its subsequent popularization following Gutemberg’s press, until the contemporary times and the advent of digital technologies, stories have been registered in many different media. Each new medium implies a new reading experience and a new way of making and enjoying such narratives. When it comes to the digital media, a great variety of options is available for both the author, who can count on many different tools for creation as well as the possibility of experiencing with the new media, and the reader, who seeks fora more significative role on the production of their favorite works. A closer relationship between readers and works of fiction is not necessarily new, considering that their reactions have been responsible for the paths narratives take for quite a while, especially when it comes to mass media narratives. However, the internet seems to be acting as a speeding agent for these longings of the audiences, acting as a bridge that garantees easy and(almost) immediate contact between authors and readers. Thus, the present work intends to investigate the relationship between authors and readers mediated by the internet, so as to point out possible changes in this dynamic potentialized by the interaction in the world wide web. Moreover, we Will also analyse and supoort the hypothesis that the hypertextual and multidisciplinary nature of digital technologies would be contributing to the creation of hybrid works, existing on the borders of two or more art forms, with special attention to the dialogue between literature and comics. For doing so, our corpus includes some works for analysis, chosen due to their unique characteristics: Homestuck (HUSSIE,2009-2016), an interactive webcomic by the American authir Andrew Hussie; and O diário de Virgínia (SILVA, C. A. B. d., 2010 – 2016), a Brazilian webcomic written by Cátia Ana. Our work is divided in five chapters, each one exploring a particular aspect of our investigation and presenting a different theoretical background: the first one, on the nature of comics and their dialogue with literature; the second one, on the hypertextual nature of the works on our corpus, aiming to explore their experimental and hybrid nature; the third one, which develops the matter of hybrid works conceived in digital media, which also presents analysis built using digital humanities tools; the forth one, which investigates the impacts of reading on the screen on readers of hypertextual fiction; and the fifth one, which explores the relationship between readers and authors on virtual environments, commenting on the productions of the readers.