3.11 - (Plat)forms after Genres

Summary

Ever since the 1960s, Russophone professional and lay authors have been leaving the printed page and climbing onto other – and, with time, online – platforms, and pairing words with (moving) images with fervour. How should we define their activities? How should we assess their visual and digital experiments? Can a social-media entry in verse by a poet be considered literature? To what extent can the text-oriented tools of traditional literary studies help us unpack GIF-laden online stories? And how do understandings of literature as a highbrow cultural practice help us to understand social-media odes to classics by teenagers? This chapter follows the forms that Russophone literary activities have taken beyond print outlets, paying special attention to digital-writing forms. It surveys literary production across websites, social media, and other digital platforms from the mid−1990s to the early 2020s by authors including Olia Lialina, Roman Leibov, Linor Goralik, Dmitrii Vodennikov, and Galina Rymbu.