Ranging from Victorian serials, penny dreadfuls, dime novels, or early films, up to contemporary television shows, comic books, or video games, in this seminar, we will think about serial forms and serialization processes across a range of media and national contexts. Seriality is a formal and narrative property of the dynamic, expansive field of aesthetic, social, and technological practices that began to develop in the nineteenth century: popular culture.
Commercial standardized production, wide distribution via modern technological innovations (beginning with the printing press), and a broad appeal focusing on mass audiences characterize this field. Further, it is within serialized popular culture that new narrative formats, roles, and practices of authorship and audiences emerge and become interwoven into the everyday routines of audiences.
Participants of the seminar will engage with scholarship from seriality studies, media studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. They will learn to apply concepts to the analysis of a wide range of cultural artifacts and are invited to contribute actively to the course with materials and presentations of their own.
- Lehrende(r): Maria Sulimma