The Co-Constructive Dynamics of Posthumous Digital Paratexts: An Analysis of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Instagram Narrative

This chapter presents an analysis of the Instagram account of the Emily DickinsonMuseum in Amherst, MA (www.instagram.com/emilydickinson.museum/) as anexample of a posthumous digital paratext. The framework of rhetorical paratex-tuality (Pignagnoli 2023) is applied, together with the theory of co-construction(Effron et al. 2019), to explain how the platform’s affordances intersect with thenarrative dynamics at play on/through the feed. As I will show, the Museum feedconveys a self-narrative about its own existence and relevance for preservingand expanding Emily Dickinson’s heritage. In so doing, it includes biographicaldetails about her and, more significantly, Emily Dickinson’s own poems. Depend-ing on the audience’s focus on the primary text being either the narrative dis-played at the Museum in Amherst, the whole feed, or the poems, the reconstruc-tion of the storyworld and the actual world is enriched by various extensions andapplications. In the form of audience’s digital paratexts, for instance, tagged postshighlight users’interest in supporting the Museum feed’schoicetoforegroundauthorial attachment for Emily Dickinson’s poems and the current attention to-ward establishing a connection with the author’s figure