The Media Politics of Russian Digital Poetry

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In the age of digital communication, the publication of Russian-language poetry has to a large extent gone online. While the reasons for this are predominantly to be found in digital media’s speed, accessibility, and low costs, the genre demands of digital platforms such as LiveJournal blogs or social network sites co-shape both the multimodal framing of poetic text and its societal and political outreach.
Going beyond binaries such as media determinism and media marginality or commodification of users and their empowerment via means of technology, the contributions to this panel investigate the diverse modes of usage of digital platforms by various contemporary Russian-language poets. They zoom in on the way in which these modes are inspired by pre-digital poetologies and post-digital political agendas. This allows the panel participants to comparatively evaluate the performative politicality of the poets' media strategies, i.e. the media politics of Russian digital poetry.

Sub Unit

• Literature: Russian and Eurasian

Chair

• Henrieke Stahl, U Trier (Germany)

Papers

• Modernist and Conceptualist Legacies in Contemporary Russian and US Avant-Gardes - Jacob Edmond, U of Otago (New Zealand)

• Intervention into Cyberspace: Techno-Poetry and Politics - Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)

Discussant

• Dirk Uffelmann, Justus Liebig U Giessen (Germany)