Reading and literature online: six cases of creating, existing and resisting

Abstract

In this work we start from the concepts of social networks and online conversations, with the authors Manuel Castells and Raquel Recuero, to analyse six cases related to the power of online conversations, especially in the field of Brazilian contemporary literature. Four of these cases relate to women writers who make use of digital media to create, exist and resist, achieving relative success in their goals of fighting the invisibility and erasure of female voices and authorship. The three categories (to create, to exist and to resist) are used here as the pillars of a certain reading about the actions of these six recent cases, namely: Mulheres Emergentes, the website of writer and editor Tânia Diniz; Mulherio das Letras, a Facebook collective of writers from all over the country (Brazil); Leia Mulheres, a multinational initiative aimed at the reading of books written by women; Bondelê, a Youtube channel by writer and editor Mariana Mendes, whose goal is to review and interview contemporary (female) writers; besides these four initiatives, we make some considerations about the reactive events that occurred in relation to the publicity pieces of a Minas Gerais literary prize and a literary event of Instituto Moreira Salles (RJ). In all of these cases, it is possible to observe how conversations enhanced by digital networks are capable of disarticulating or, at the very least, disturbing what has been established, on and off the computer.