Media of Serial Narrative

by Frank Kelleter (Editor)

Overview

Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, is the first book-length study to address the increasingly popular topic of serial narratives—specifically, how practices and forms of seriality shape media throughout the landscape of popular culture. In modern entertainment formats, seriality and popularity can seem so obviously connected that scholarship has long neglected to address their specific interrelations. This volume looks closely at the relationship between seriality, popularity, media, and narrative form and asks: What are the structural conditions of serial stories? Which historical circumstances are presupposed or supported by series and serials? How do commercial types of seriality differ from serial structures in other cultural fields?
Media of Serial Narrative focuses on key sites and technologies of popular seriality since the mid-nineteenth century and up to today: newspapers, comics, cinema, television, and digital communication. Paying close attention to the affordances of individual media, as well as to their historical interactions, the fourteen chapters survey the forms, processes, and functions of popular serial storytelling. With individual chapters by Frank Kelleter, Jared Gardner, Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, Scott Higgins, Shane Denson, Ruth Mayer, Kathleen Loock, Constantine Verevis, Jason Mittell, Sudeep Dasgupta, Sean O’Sullivan, Henry Jenkins, Christine Hämmerling, Mirjam Nast, and Andreas Sudmann, Media of Serial Narrative is an exciting and broad-ranging intervention in the fields of seriality, media, and narrative studies.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814253991
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	05/05/2017
Series:	THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV
Edition description:	1
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Frank Kelleter is Chair and Einstein Professor of American Cultural History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction About This Volume 1

Chapter 1 Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality Frank Kelleter 7

Part I Literature and Comics

Chapter 2 Antebellum Popular Serialities and the Transatlantic Birth of "American" Comics Jared Gardner 37

Chapter 3 Serial Politics in Antebellum America: On the Cultural Work of the City-Mystery Genre Daniel Stein 53

Chapter 4 Serial Entertainment / Serial Pleasure: The Yellow Kid Christina Meyer 74

Part II Cinema

Chapter 5 Inevitability of Chance: Time in the Sound Serial Scott Higgins 93

Chapter 6 Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula Shane Denson Ruth Mayer 108

Chapter 7 Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Serialization Frank Kelleter Kathleen Loock 125

Chapter 8 New Millennial Remakes Constantine Verevis 148

Part III Television

Chapter 9 The Ends of Serial Criticism Jason Mittell 169

Chapter 10 Sensing the Opaque: Seriality and the Aesthetics of Televisual Form Sudeep Dasgupta 183

Chapter 11 The Inevitable, the Surprise, and Serial Television Sean O'Sullivan 204

Part IV Transmedia and Digitality

Chapter 12 "All Over the Map": Building (and Rebuilding) Oz Henry Jenkins 225

Chapter 13 Popular Seriality in Everyday Practice: Perry Rhodan and Tatort Christine Hämmerling Mirjam Nast 248

Chapter 14 Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games Shane Denson Andreas Sudmann 261

List of Contributors 285

Index 288

Editorial Reviews

Media of Serial Narrative is an important and timely book. … It expands the scope and territory of serial criticism to the realms of cinema and games (Denson and Sudmann), which are not covered by traditional scholarship. … [and] represents a valuable resource for everyone
in media and American studies and interested in popular seriality.” —Gunter Süẞ, Amerikastudien 

“Media of Serial Narrative is a strong collection that adds significantly to our understanding of seriality across media. As a whole, the volume both ranges widely across media and time and also tightly coheres around the history of seriality. I believe Media of Serial Narrative will have real impact in the fields of film, television, literature, comics, and games where there is interest in seriality, and I highly recommend it.” -Greg Smith, author of Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal and Film Structure and the Emotion System

“This bouquet of essays assembles the best work of an international collaborative inquiry into how cultures narrate themselves. Once you understand the concept of seriality, the world will never look the same, from mitosis and planetary rotation to comics and television shows. This volume ranges across the variegated forms of popular culture of the last two centuries, casting searchlights into serial nooks and crannies.” —John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“Media of Serial Narrative is a necessary and exciting anthology in any study of contemporary storytelling.” —Linda Williams, author of Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson and On The Wire

From the Publisher