“I Am Not Myself, You See?”: Remediation and Mediatization in the Insta Novels Project

Abstract

In the summer of 2018, the New York Public Library Instagram page, and Mother—New York City creative company, launched a project named Insta Novels, presenting five canonic literary works in the form of an Instagram Story. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, Insta Novels offers a glimpse into the contradictions that arise when literature and its institutions intersect with social networks, advertising agencies, and digital media. This article explores the Insta Novels project as a case study of how remediation and mediatization serve as useful theoretical concepts, enabling the examination of cultural objects in the new media environment at both the macro and micro levels. A grounded analysis of the project’s stories, articles, and Instagram hashtags revealed four embedded tensions: between literature and technology; eternity and temporality; personal and public; and readers and users.