Sailing is (in)determinate: a reading of the hypertextual novel Terminal

Abstract

. In this paper, we propose an analysis about the specificities of the hypertextual novel Terminal (Komatsu, 2018), mainly concerning its material formalization as a literary object of the new media (Manovich, 2005), which makes converge references to printed and digital culture. We seek to discuss the aspects that highlight that the work puts itself in an intermediary place by i) obliterating the computational logic of the Blogger platform and ii) obliterating the novel’s paradigms consolidated by the printed culture. Thus, the work presents characteristics that make us ponder on two distinct cultural realities, printed and digital, and, in doing so, resignifies the cultural and material practices of the new media at the same time it provokes fissures in the rites institutionalized by the printed culture. Such analysis leads us to think over hypertextual literary reading as an extranoematic effort (Aarseth, 1997) and how it occurs in the work in question, from the analysis of one of the possible paths offered to the reader, who pilots, metaphorically, a spaceship interface while reading the work. The themed navigation expands and establishes a dialogue with the material characteristics of the medium, at the same time in which consolidates itself as a poetical resource for the narrative.