Postdigital stylistics: creative multimodal interpretation of poetry and internet mashups

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language, particularly literary style. Poetry has been a staple of stylistics. Creative performance of poems and stylistic analysis, however, have rarely been bedfellows. I showcase a stylistics pedagogy for creatively interpreting poetry in higher education where students make digitally multimodal storied interpretations of poems. The pedagogy reflects contemporary internet mashup culture, recognising that students inhabit a “postdigital” world where commonplace software and resources offer opportunities for DIY juxtaposition of audio and video for different purposes – artistic, comedic, etc. An advantage of such Postdigital Stylistics is that it integrates performance-based readers, marginalised in exegetical reading practices associated with print. I illustrate the pedagogy with a student video of Charles Bukowski’s poem “the bluebird”, accessible analysis of its foregrounded style, and explanation of how this analysis – crucially – motivates shot design.