Literary Heredity and Variation in Selected Facebook Poems of Veralyn Chinenye And Her Collaborative Authors

Abstract

Facebook has become one of the mediums of creativity and criticism of works of art as a result of the nature of its blended writing. At the “completion” of a composition, Facebook poems maintain a certain degree of the static form, which is a characteristic of print literature. Facebook poetry coalesces the oral and print into a “new” form of poetry and extends the boundaries of oral and print literature. Using Bolter and Grusin concept of Remediation as a theoretical framework, this paper examines literary heredity and variation in selected Facebook poems of Veralyn Chinenye and her collaborative authors and participants. The paper further examines the characteristics and criticism of Facebook poetry and explicates the functionality of “Emoji”, “Comments”, “Share”, and intertextuality in the on-going creation and criticism of Facebook poetry that is different from the conventional perception and practice of literary creativity and criticism. Through the examples of poetry analysed in this paper, our findings show that digital literature is, to an extent, fluid and shares identical characteristics with oral literature in terms of artist and audience participation, occasion of performance