Abstract
A book trailer is an advertising tool designed on the model of the movie trailer: a short, recorded video aimed at introducing and promoting a book. Some teachers use the book trailers as a didactic device for the teaching of literature in order to achieve various educational and pedagogical goals. We propose to examine what becomes of the literary works in the book trailers. Our hypothesis is that the tool itself determines how learners represent the texts studied in class, due to the device’s multimodal and digital nature, the result of an adaptation process, due also to its brevity and its original advertising function. The analysis of the data collected in two classes of French high school shows that the use of the book trailers results in a reconfiguration of the literary texts. This reconfiguration operates in terms of registers and genres and directs the appropriation by the readers of the literary works, and the expression of this appropriation , towards their spectacularization.