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Ideal Outline, SECTIONE ONE: CELEBRITY UNEASINESS AND PERSONAL BRANDING,…

- - - - I suggest Rupi Kaur is the ideal figure to study this transition. As the most visible instapoet, she has circulated across traditional and digital environments in an enormous way. Most critics don't bother to knock instapoetry floating around online. Nobody seems that annoyed by the amateur spirit for its own sake. It's when those online poets cross over into the traditional world that they get dismissed, which is why only published instapoets get critiqued. There's an uneasiness about the porosity of borders.
        
        Summing up my thesis here, which is that Rupi Kaur is legible as an author even if gatekeepers do not want acknowledge her as such. I maintain her trajectory as a poet makes most sense when compared in relation to celebrity studies.
- - - - This leads to what I call "the author as influencer," which refers to the way the figure of the author circulates in social media environments as an entrepreneurial persona. Poetry/Poet is a personal brand.
        
        This leads to my analysis of Kaur's self-mythologization as an outsider. I take a one line poem, "I am waking up to my godself," to show how such a short poem goes so far in terms of showing how Kaur travels between the categories of "author" and "influencer." She maintains a proximate distance to the literary even while maintaining her position as outlier. Here, I show how the criticism that her poetry is short and pithy lays the groundwork for her poetic persona.
        
        I suggest the Godself is evocative for thinking about how Kaur's personal branding signifies a conflict. She is both a social media brand and a Canadian literary product. Her personal brand encapsulates the complexities of contemporary cultural and literary spheres. There is an uneasiness surrounding her ability to navigate both spaces fully
        
        I extend my analysis to Kaur's self-fashioning, bringing in work by diverse scholars like Srinivavas Aravamudan and Stephen Greenblatt to show how Kaur erects a visual persona through costuming that is cultural anachronistic (global Anglophone). Works to mythologize her as a nation-less author.
- - - - As such, Kaur's personal branding as "Outsider" allows her to maintain a fringe connection to "the literary" as its most celebrated/reviled other, and this is also how she markets herself so successfully to an audience. She is exceptional because she has an air of "literariness."