Booktubers and the platformization of literary criticism on YouTube

Abstract

The literary criticism carried out by journalists and literati in the periodicals of the 19th and 20th centuries, with the technical development of the web in contemporary times, is now performed by booktubers - people who comment, analyze and indicate literary works on video platforms like YouTube. With the hypothesis that literary criticism is reelaborated from multimodal elements and the platformization of society, it was established the goal of identifying how this discursive genre is constructed from a Bakhtinian reading and a qualitative-interpretativist reading. To do so, a diachronic cutout of the year 2020 was made in the channel Vamos falar sobre livros? (Let's talk about books?) by booktuber Gisele Eberspächer, composing a corpus of 58 samples. The results showed the institution of two main textual typologies, the list and review of specific books, which rework literary criticism from audiovisual elements and tools made available by the YouTube platform, thus amplifying and recovering the potential "public character" of the literary critic as an important social actor, who mediates through social networks, new literary ethos.