Visual Poetry on Social Media Platforms
New Media Aesthetic and Digital Activism
This dissertation aims to investigate current visual and audio-visual poetry on social media platforms, including Instapoetry, poems on Twitter and Tik Tok, and selected video poems on YouTube. This kind of popular poetry is characterized by multimodal elements: text, photographs and illustrations, layout, color, composition, typography, and hypertextual references such as hashtags are modes that evoke both aesthetic and sociopolitical meaning.
A multimodal discourse analysis will examine how visual and sociopolitical components meaningfully relate to each other in poems about issues such as gender, mental health, and migrant and national identities, by poets from the German-speaking and Anglophone worlds, and from Poland, such as Yrsa Daley-Ward and Anna Ciarkowska. The project will also include a netnographic analysis of the comment sections beneath social media poems to investigate the role of online communities, i.e., the readers of social media poems and the contribution they make to the construction of meaning in digital cultures and with regard to participatory cultures in particular. Moreover, this project will also study other relevant aspects such as the relationship between text and image, nature as a literary motif, the construction of subjectivity and authenticity, historical references to the period of Romanticism, certain social media affordances and aesthetics.
Not only is classical book poetry “not a luxury,” as Audre Lorde (1985) famously claimed, but social media poetry also attempts to empower readers by combatting misogyny, racism, the climate crisis, and stereotypes regarding mental health. Therefore, ecocritical approaches, current feminist perspectives on gender and mental health, and postcolonial theories form the theoretical basis of this dissertation. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the research project’s methods and theories, it is situated at the intersection of cultural studies, visual culture research, literary studies, and media studies. This wide range of perspectives is also visible in its international corpus, which considers poets from varying language and cultural areas, thereby making it possible to scrutinize the aspect of cultural influence as well as a possible “universal” language of social media poetry. The project will make an important contribution to the so far rather overlooked field of social media poetry by specifically analyzing the interplay between visual aesthetics and sociopolitical messages.