Reading and Poetics in Printed Literary Games at the Turn of the 20th Century

Abstract

Long-lasting phenomena, literary games such as riddles, logogriphs and anagrams have their origin in distant narratives and cultural practices that precede its records in classical antiquity. Traces and fragments of these eccentric and dialogic microforms can be easily found in popular culture and the digital environment, indicating its survival and contemporary relevance. Since games have as their subject matter the language itself, we will try to demonstrate how they stimulate linguistic and media self-awareness simultaneously. In this sense, we used computational tools to track and compare the publication of these games in digital libraries with collections of the French and Brazilian press, identifying their significant popularization at the end of the nineteenth century. We assume this large quantitative increase as a cut to analyze qualitative changes in the games, from a detailed analysis of some examples that demonstrate some of the difficulties of adaptation and translation of literary games in different cultural and linguistic realities. Finally, we will try to demonstrate how the printed literary games developed a poetic media of their own, as well as a particular reading form that relates to the material conditions of the press itself.