Literature: digital context, hipercolonialism and materialities

ABSTRACT In this article, I try to discuss some aspects of the digital world and the place literature occupies in it, especially as its digital transmediation renders both challenges and new possibilities to literary studies. In fact, this situation encourages the discussion about who detains control over the literary databases, how they are organized and how access to them is granted, in a strategy that may seem as hipercolonial (several masters control the same territory still in search of an identity). In a strict observation of medium as signified and as a signifier, I discuss the contemporary interest on the manners of production, circulation and reception of the literary object, with special concern about the role of the artist in the construction of the object in relation to the notion of intermediality. Finally, I initiate a discussion about the author figure shadowing the importance of the literary object.