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Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures
Matthew KilbaneExpressive Networks convenes an urgent conversation on digital media and the social life of contemporary poetry. Tracing how poems circulate through online spaces and how capitalized platforms have come to pattern the reading and writing of poetry, contributors emphasize both the expressivist cast of digital literary culture and the deep-running ambivalence that characterizes aesthetic and critical responses to platformed cultural production. The volume features chapters on Pan- African spoken word programs, Singaporean Facebook groups, decolonial hemispheric networks, and Japanese media-critical poetries as well as platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, and Amazon.
Though contributors write from a variety of methodological positions and address themselves to a range of archives, they share the primary conviction that the impact of Web 2.0 on literary practice is far-reaching, far from self-evident, and far more variegated and unpredictable than easy summations of social media’s influence suggest. Expressive Networks asks after poetry’s present and future by examining what poems themselves express about the social make-up of networked platforms.
Edited by Matthew Kilbane with contributions from Cameron Awkward-Rich, Micah Bateman, Andrew Campana, Sumita Chakraborty, Scott Challener, C.R. Grimmer, Tess McNulty, Michael Nardone, Seth Perlow, Anna Preus, Susanna Sacks, Carly Schnitzler, Melanie Walsh, and Samuel Caleb Wee.
"Online platforms matter. Poetics, poetry writing, poetry reception, poetry criticism, and all the activities that seem adjacent to those things can be shaped, remade, narrowed, or given other dimensions not just by the fact of the Internet (which is old news) or by digital composition (arguably also old news) but by the particular layered platforms on which and amid which they stand. It matters whether a poet publishes on Instagram or by hand-coding a site. It matters who pays for a spoken-word tour and who puts the tour online and how. It matters to poetic composition whether a Facebook group devoted to that composition is locked and private or open to the public. And these matters have a history: we can do literary history with them, as well as aesthetic appreciation and detraction, criticism about criticism, media-network studies, and Marxist or sorta-of-Marxist critique. All these modes of analysis turn up in Expressive Networks, and all are used well. This volume will be a big deal."
—Stephanie Burt, Harvard University
"This important volume offers literary criticism augmented for the age of networked platforms. From its plugged-in introduction to its well-tuned chapters, Expressive Networks offers a collection of timely readings of digital poetic objects."
—Mark Marino, University of Southern California
Matthew Kilbane is assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame. A scholar of modern and contemporary poetry, media studies, and the digital humanities, he is author of The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
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- 979-8-89506-001-8 (open access)
- 979-8-89506-002-5 (hardcover)
- 979-8-89506-000-1 (paperback)