Guest lecture - Ella Mingazova: "Instapoetry: When Poetry Goes Viral"

The DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Russian-Language Poetry in Transition” (FOR 2603) cordially invites you to a live lecture by Ella Mingazova (University of Liège), entitled „Instapoetry: When Poetry Goes Viral“. The lecture will be held in English and will be streamed live via Zoom. Please register by e-mail with our coordinator Katja Baharova (baharova@uni-trier.de) no later than November 24, 2020, to receive the access data.

Instapoetry: When Poetry Goes Viral

Generally considered as a demanding, elitist literary genre, poetry has regained in popularity in recent years with the help of social media. Platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, lying at the margins of the usual literary circuit, yet at the center of digital life, offer new ways for (self-)publishing and consuming poetry. The term “instapoetry,” a portmanteau word of Instagram and poetry, is now commonly used to describe the popular new sub-genre of poetry published on Instagram. Characterized by a very straightforward style, close to ordinary language, and generally written in free verse, Instapoetry looks strikingly simple and sometimes naive. The simplicity of most Instapoetry, which clearly contributes to its popularity, is opposed to the traditional idea of a poem as a difficult, sometimes ambiguous, formally constrained text. The increasing visibility of the genre has led to a debate in the literary community regarding its artistic value. This presentation will discuss how this debate – frequently framed around the question of superficial and deep attention and around speed and slowness – reflects the broader issue of the diminished status of the printed book in the age of digital media, which closely intersects with the collapse of the distinction between serious and popular literature.

Ella Mingazova is currently a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Liège and the University of Leuven (Belgium). The focus of her research is on the effect of slowness in reading narratives in brief and long forms. Her broader interests include duration and ephemerality in the current cultural context of acceleration. Her research has appeared in the journals Image [&] Narrative and Studies in Travel Writing.