Series and Seriality in Media Culture

Abstract

Research on the series, more or less synchronic with the emergence of this kind of textual construction, has shown a shift in opinions and goals in recent decades. The present article grew out of a research programme concerning one of the most important issues facing media culture: the medium of television and its predominantly narrative mode. This article discusses serial narratives in general and aims to develop an interpretative framework which can reveal the unity on which the full variety of series is based and demonstrate that the diversity of series and genres of series is the outcome of different transformation processes taking place within the media culture. The narratological perspective on the unity of the serial forms is called for by the need to determine seriality as a main condition imposed by media on all kinds of narrative and to articulate a comparative system which would be generally applicable in the analysis of serial narratives. The object of this article, which examines elementary aspects of seriality, is limited to fictional texts (feuilleton, comic, soap, detective, drama). Special attention is given to the constraints determining the ensemble of constitutive elements and which regulate the regimes of fabricating and receiving these kinds of serial narratives. The reconsideration of seriality as a concept and regime of constructing fictional worlds is structured around significant features, such as serial transformation of narratives, the dialectics of series and serial, the relationship between continuity and segmentation generating and organizing serial narratives, and the typologies of serial constructions.