Art or Con? Exploring Instapoetry at the Nexus of Influencer Culture, Author-Entrepreneurism, and Literary Innovation
Abstract
This dissertation examines what it means to be a poet originating from social media, commercially driven spaces of digital culture and commerce, and the nexus of influencer culture and entrepreneurism that impacts contemporary literary production online. Situated at the intersection of Canadian literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies, my dissertation conducts case studies of three “instapoets” in Canada: Tenille Campbell, Rupi Kaur, and Najwa Zebian.
In the mid-2010s, a type of born-digital poetry known as “instapoetry” exploded onto the literary scene via social media. Following the publication of Kaur’s Milk and Honey in 2014, which sold over six million copies, print poetry sales rose to record-breaking highs. Instapoetry combines textual, visual, and paratextual, forms, as well as personal, sartorial, and embodied elements in both print and digital formats. Instapoetry’s success triggered widespread debates about instapoetry’s literariness along sharply divided lines. Whereas some critics praise it as a type of poetic innovation, others denounce its failure to meet the standards of traditional poetry.
Like instapoetry, this dissertation is a combination: it crosses disciplinary schools of thought and modes of analysis. It seeks to understand the extent to which instapoetry intersects with, on the one hand, established literary traditions, institutions, or histories, and, on the other, with the nested entrepreneurial and commercial interests of social media platforms. As such, it is structured from most to least “literary”—not in an evaluative sense, but rather clinically—in order to theorize how social media impacts the purposes to which poetry is put today; figures the author into a new type of media celebrity; and creates new spaces of literary community. Each case study analyzes primary textual material such as print poetry collections; social media content like images, captions, and comments; and popular interviews in literary magazines, journals, and podcasts.
Chapter One focuses on Tenille Campbell. The poet, who is Dene and Métis, has appropriated the algorithm-controlled network of Instagram to write herself into an evolving Indigenous literary tradition and community of artists, writers, and entrepreneurs, bypassing the politics of Canadian publishing and defining herself as an Indigenous author. Chapter Two examines Rupi Kaur, who occupies a liminal position between traditional literary institutions and social media influence. A paraliterary figure, she straddles two territories, first, as a self-branded social media persona, and second, as a Canadian literary brand. This liminality breeds a sense of uneasiness within the Canadian literary scene, as it challenges the power and prestige of the literary establishment. Chapter Three looks at how poetry functions as primarily entrepreneurial material when it is specifically mobilized as self-care content, rendering a national framework irrelevant entirely. This poetry, while it appears “literary,” is valued not for its aesthetic purposes, but for its perceived ability to transform readers into better, happier, healed individuals.
Instapoetry in Canada ultimately connects to larger transformations in the contemporary literary sphere as new and old ecosystems collide. The “instapoetry” label merely scratches the surface of a multi-platform, multi-media, and transnational phenomenon.