Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life(Psychoanalytic Horizons)

This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one. The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative – from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books – seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality – in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint – names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear. Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically – serially – connected.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Mind the Gap 1. Psyche Is Extended: Dickens, Marx, Freud, and Seriality's Theoretical Beginnings 2. Lacan, Relation, and the Serial Symbolic 3. Theorizing the Cut of Seriality: Why the Quilting Point Arrests and the Master Signifier Obscures 4. Seriality at the Formal Limit of Television 5. From Film Serials to Streaming Television, or the Gaps in the Gapless 6. Social Media against Seriality 7. Radical Repetition Conclusion: The Serial Is Serious Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Ryan Engley is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA. He is series editor of Film Theory in Practice (Bloomsbury) and co-hosts the Why Theory podcast.

Review :
Ryan Engley offers a revelatory theory of how serial media forms engage existential and even political realities. Highly original in its scope and insightful about both art forms and psychoanalytic philosophy, this compelling work is a must-teach for contemporary cultural studies.