Poetry and Platform Cultures (NeMLA 2022)
Buffalo, New York
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
Event: NeMLA 2022
This NeMLA panel convenes literary critics, media scholars, and poets themselves to study how social media platforms are transforming the reading and writing of contemporary poetry. Panelists may ask to what extent the participatory dynamics of Web 2.0 now condition the politics of contemporary poetry, where “politics” signifies both the institutional lifeforms of poetry’s production and circulation, and the ostensible public efficacy of poems themselves. We might consider how poetry’s relationships to activist praxis and to social movements like Black Lives Matter in the U.S., for example, have been mediated by social media. Moreover, to the degree the protocols of “surveillance” or “platform capitalism” driving these platforms inflect literary cultures online, we may study how poems respond to these new formations of capital. To pursue such questions, this panel aims to traverse methodological territories, from literary and cultural studies to critical media theory and the computational humanities. Indeed we hope to exemplify the reimagined forms of literary criticism required by the challenge of studying poetry’s networked future.
All papers on the subject of contemporary poetry and social media are warmly welcomed.
Please submit your proposed abstract (approx. 250 words) at the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20105
Proposals are due by September 30, 2022.
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20105
Matt Kilbane