The remediation of children’s poetry and ‘the empty space’ in the text: a reflection based on the digital anthology ‘tear poético’

Abstract

The idea of transposing a literary work for children from print to digital media, in a process that Bolter and Grusin call “remediation” (BOLTER AND GRUSIN, 2000), often draws criticism from agents within the educational-literary ecosystem itself. This is because, by using the resources specific to the digital medium, it could supposedly reduce the reader's imaginative capacity, since it would, a priori, fill in the gaps left by the written text with images, sounds and interactive resources, for example; gaps that should be filled in by the reader themselves, based on their life experience and reading ability. In this article, which draws on the concept of the ‘empty space’ theorised by Iser (ISER, 1999), we seek to consider works of digital literature for young people as opportunities to expand reading, rather than limit it, based on an analysis of remediations of Brazilian and Portuguese poems carried out for the Tear Poético website, a digital anthology developed by CONTE (2025), available at: www.tearpoetico.net.