A Poetics of Global Trolling

Abstract

Plato’s characterization of speech genres insists that lyric poetry must be uttered by the poet speaking as him- or herself, a demand often occurring in the history of poetic theories around the world. The grammatical person of the speaker is easily confused or hijacked, however, as accounts of fictionality or insincerity remind us. Widespread social media that influence large numbers of people otherwise unknown to each other are particularly susceptible to such appropriation. Trolling, formerly a merely disruptive communicative behaviour, has achieved global prominence through the use of bots or virtual electronic subjects to which embodied human subjects attribute feeling and agency. This is the “global poetics” of today. The age-old tension between lyric and drama continues.