Between Popular Cultural Authorship and Post-Scholarly Criticism: The Structural Analysis of the Digital Video Essay Form

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the digital video essay form on YouTube as a recent communicative and communal phenomenon, emphasizing the historical roles academic scholarship and popular cultural production have played in its emergence. On the one hand, by theorizing what I call ‘post-scholarly’ criticism, I explore and outline the potential influences of academic thought on the contemporary generation of former and current students, who produce video essays for public consumption on this platform. With some of them reaching over one million views, these video essays have become an immensely popular cultural critical genre on English-speaking YouTube, which often mobilizes concepts, contexts, and methods commonly associated with the humanities and liberal arts disciplines. By often expressing their left-leaning views in their analysis of popular cultural phenomena from artworks to digital aesthetics and discourse, today’s digital author-critics reproduce scholarly concerns that once famously marked the ‘radical’ cultural turn in the 1980s and onward. Specifically, video essayists often generate cultural criticism of mass-produced artworks / popular cultural trends and utilize the tools of critical theory to address systemic, institutional and political issues that they identify in contemporary corporate cultural industries as well as in digital cultural consumption and production. By examining this digital genre, I suggest that these critics rely on a loose scholarly episteme of intellectual fandom. Importantly, the move away from the professional academic domain encapsulated in the contemporary digital video essay form testifies to the structural process of deinstitutionalization taking place. In other words, I broadly argue that today’s digital post-scholarly critics publicly express a cultural and political trend towards deinstitutionalizing academic criticism and scholarship, which, in turn, calls for new articulations of the value of the humanities in academia today. On the other hand, my dissertation also argues that contemporary digital authorship must be considered as a part of the historical trajectory related to popular amateur creative practices and new attractional multimedia mode of thinking. It has long been stressed that historically creative cultural practices situated around recombining various mediums prefigured the contemporary digital popular production witnessed on social platforms today. However, I suggest that it is important to consider the idea of the post-literary public sphere that has emerged as a direct result of mass cultural production in the west. I conceptualize the broad, post-literary public sphere in terms of the distinctive popular creative practices and communicative forms it has produced, arguing that contemporary digital authorship is an important emerging mode of self-articulation in today’s global western cultural context. The conversational, personalized, and immediately situated digital public genre of the video essay attributes heightened importance to individual self-expression as the pathway to broader social, cultural, and political dialogue. Thus, today’s digital authorship reminds us of the salient historical value of publicly circulating literary forms — their potential for generating a civic public sphere. Ultimately, by theorizing the digital video essay form through the constellation of post-scholarly criticism and popular cultural authorship, this dissertation offers a dialectical perspective for studying new modes of digital communication.