BETWEEN LANGUAGES: INTERMEDIALITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING IN A INVENÇÃO DE HUGO CABRET

Abstract

This text proposes to analyze the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (2007), from the theory of intermediality. The book, which is composed of images and alphabetic text, combines two types of language that give meaning to the narrative. In an unconventional way, the story is told from images and words, without one of the languages overlapping the other, in a narrative that approaches cinematography. Unlike the recurrent children's texts, in which the images only exemplify the written text, the drawings of Selznick's work not only illustrate the narrative, but are an integral part of it, since the story is only capable of meaning through illustrations and written text. The images emerge in the text in an effect of movement, alluding to the cinematographic narrative, an important element of meaning in the book. From this context, the work will be analyzed from the perspective of intermediality, a theory proposed by Claus Clüver, based on the assumption that reading is not limited only to the alphabetic text, as stated by Maria Helena Martins (2003), but rather to multisensory proposals.