Digital and Poshuman Narratives in Literature

This chapter aims at exploring how narratives for children and their transmedia adaptations can be a crucial part in the production of meaning of our time. By investigating the Western notion of childhood not as a neutral status, but one which is an idealised trope in which is embedded our sense of posterity and which embodies aspects of political nature that have profound educational and ethical implications, children’s narratives can thus be interpreted as one of the privilege sites from where to disclose and critically rethink what can be counted as human and the role of the humanities. In particular, this chapter asks how transmedia children’s narratives are able to protect, promote and transmit European texts as global heritage, and how they are able to reshape cultural memory and ethical principles by fostering children’s and youths’ education. The analysis addresses these issues by exploring The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) as an exemplary case of children’s literature that has generated a great variety of transmedia narratives and highlights how its complex and multi-layered status in our global culture can contribute to pursue an understanding of our cultural orientations towards the future and towards a new ethical territory where the humanities converge with digital technologies and the politics of the form.