Seriality - (Psychoanalytic Horizons) by Ryan Engley (Hardcover)

About the Book

This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be a dominant form of culture since the 19th-century, as both a media structure and a psychic one, coinciding with Sigmund Freud's discovery of the gaps at work in the psyche.

Book Synopsis

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 Lifeshifts 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.

Review Quotes

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.
Anna Kornbluh, Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA

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.