Series Of Narratives Research Articles

Treme: New Orleans Remix

The three seasons of Treme broadcast so far on HBO show how life, in all its forms (economic, social, cultural), resumed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The multi-track dimension of the show (we see bits and pieces of the existence of common people, without a rigid narrative structure) falls into one form of the serial narrative, which tends to erase the notions of beginning and ending and gives the impression of a flow in which we get caught for the duration of each episode. The passages from one narrative arc to another occur very fluidly, evoking a musical construction. Indeed, by using as a main structure the different musical performances which punctuate the series, Treme is above all a recreation of the rhythm and beat of a city: music accompanies the important moments of the lives of these characters, and the major stages of the plot and of character development seem to follow the typical jazz structure – recurring phrases submitted to variations and improvisations. The combination of historical facts and fiction in this musical structure also alllows Treme to take up highly political issues: it reflects the specificity of a city that refuses to give in, and strongly defends its culture. This article focuses on the way these original narrative and aesthetic choices manage to echo a political questioning of the nature of the trauma that hit New Orleans in 2005. Far from being a natural, inevitable disaster like the hurricane itself, the flooding which ensued was, in Creighton Bernette’s terms (the character performed by John Goodman) “a man-made catastrophe, a federal fuck up of epic proportions, and decades in the making.” Treme’s fictional enterprise could thus be seen as an attempt to reorchestrate this recent history and its human consequences, unlike stereotypical media or political representations.

Serial Narrative, Intertextuality, and the Role of Audiences in the Creation of a Franchise: An Analysis of the Indiana Jones Saga from a Cross-Media Perspective

Rather than the simple adaptation of a story across different media, cross-media narrative should be defined as that which is transformed by virtue of use a medium and its different languages (film, comics, video games, etc.). This article extends and updates the dimensions of previous cross-media analysis models by underlining narrative aspects of the different products discussed and examining the influence of generic conventions along the way. To test this methodology, the article focuses on a product from the “adventure” genre— the Indiana Jones franchise—which it argues should be seen as a benchmark in the history of this kind of narrative. Special attention is given to the treatment of the character of Indiana Jones, who is the true focal point of the narrative, and to other underlying thematic features.

Bridges and gaps: The Singing Detective’s serial afterlife

Abstract The Singing Detective has long been considered a high point of televisual storytelling. But what is its specific legacy as a serial narrative, particularly in the contemporary U.S. context of ambitious dramas? In many ways, the experiment of The Singing Detective remains an outlier. If the likes of Mad Men and The Sopranos have re-invigorated seriality by emphasizing the gaps between episodes—by making the narrative broken rather than connected—The Singing Detective’s continuing contribution lies in its insistence on bridging the disparate parts that make a serial: old and new, sound and image, memory and imagination, ritual and eccentricity.

Serializing National Cohesion: Channel 1's “Shkola” and the Contradictions of Post‐Soviet “Consensus Management”

Parliaments rarely debate television serials. Such, however, was the controversy surrounding Valeriia Gai‐Germanika's 69‐part “Shkola” (“School”), shown on Russia's Channel 1 in 2010, that several Duma Deputies called for its banning. Filmed with hand‐held cameras and unknown actors, “Shkola” offered an uncompromising insight into problems afflicting Russian schools: racism, corruption, casual sex, suicide, drug‐taking, self‐harming, bullying, bribery, violence, and unremitting disorder in classrooms characterised by unimaginative teaching. “Shkola” posed unprecedented challenges to the boundaries of the permissible. This article, however, evaluates the serial's capacity to foster national cohesion, not in the “top‐down” manner characteristic of state media events such as Victory Day, but through a multi‐levelled dialectic of centre and periphery. Drawing on Jesus Martin‐Barbero's mediation theory, the article traces the dialectic through the serial narrative's split structure: its oscillation between a naturalistic aesthetic based on metonymic displacements from society's centre to specific conflicts at its margins, and a melodramatic sentimentalism suited to the metaphoric modelling of that centre and the articulation of a discourse of universal empathy. The dialectic facilitates a mutual engagement of voices (official patriotic, Soviet nostalgic, nationalist extremist, liberal oppositionalist, vernacular racist) in which each contaminates or revitalises the other and in which Gai‐Germanika's preferred universalist stance fails to prevail. The article includes an assessment of the broader implications of “Shkola” for public discourse in Russia.

Machinic Fu Manchu: Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread

This paper explores the processes of serial narration in view of the serial enactment of Fu Manchu. Its contention is that seriality is a principle rather than a technique and that this principle cannot be deduced to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a ‘machinic’ momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding. It is no mere circumstance that the most successful serial narratives—like the Fu Manchu narratives—were initiated in the ‘long’ 19th century with its expansionist ambitions regarding the spread of global capitalism and the modern nation state, and then were propelled by the engines of 20th-century media modernity. The Fu Manchu narratives lend themselves to an investigation of the principle of seriality because they vent the serial logic of expansion, excrescence, and spread both on a thematical and a formal level and tightly interweave structural and ideological functions. In consequence, the narratives have to be seen as serial performances or enactments, rather than representations, of the yellow peril theme. They do not so much express politico-social fears and cultural anxieties from the vantage point of an author or individual text, but work as engines in the serial machinery which generates and spreads ideological certainties.

Book Review: Christiana Gregoriou, Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives

Book Review: Christiana Gregoriou, <i>Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives</i>

Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media

Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media Ruth Page (bio) Serial form has long been of interest to narrative scholars, but the characteristics of serial narrative identified thus far have been derived primarily from fictional examples in older media forms such as print texts and television. The key characteristics of serial form (e.g., part-whole segmentation and sequenced installments) can also be found in other storytelling modes, including stories that emerge from contemporary social-media contexts. In this article, using nonfictional as well as fictional narrative examples taken from social-network sites (YouTube), microblogging (Twitter), and wikis (Wikipedia), I identify both familiar and new patterns of seriality. Alongside recognized, familiar kinds of serial narratives, the new forms of seriality include non-teleological storytelling, reverse-order archiving, and the sequenced deletion (rather than addition) of material. Overall, the social-media serial forms I discuss highlight the way seriality is often a matter of degree and emphasize the importance of attending to the relationship between narrative process and product. The [End Page 31] relative nature of seriality reinforces the need for a contextualized approach to narrative criticism, one that takes account of the perspectives of narrators and audiences, along with the sociohistorical situation of stories that emerge in serial form. Serial Form and Narrativity Narrative analysts have explored serial forms in discussions of nineteenth-century literature (Hayward 1997; Hughes and Lund 1991), television narrative (Mittell 2007), comic books, and film serials (Barefoot 2011), and they are beginning to engage with newer media such as computer games (Newman and Simon 2011), fandoms (Thomas 2010), and web-disseminated narratives (Lang 2010). These serial forms have provided vital stimulus for exploring narratological issues such as plot dynamics, suspense, and teleological resolution; for contrasting episodic and serial genres; and for tracing the evolution of particular serial forms from conventional to more complex modes (Mittell 2006). Despite the transmedial, broadly historical scope of these discussions, the focus has almost exclusively rested on fictional genres (but see Kelleter forthcoming as an exception to this trend). What is more, in identifying core attributes of serial narratives, analysts have tended to rely on a specific subcorpus of largely plot-driven, fictional modes. To come to terms with the full range of serial storytelling, theorists need to consider other varieties of serial narration, including those found in contemporary social-media contexts. The examples I focus on in this article suggest an alternative subcorpus that affords new insights into serial form. In particular, the social-media storytelling brought under scrutiny here—storytelling in wikis, social-network sites, and microblogging sites—highlights the importance of considering modes of production and reception in studies of seriality. These modes may be set alongside those found in offline forms of narration and in other online narrative environments that would not be classed as social media (e.g., hypertext fiction or e-mail novels). The social-media focus of this article thus extends the range of serial examples used as a basis for theory building while also underscoring the potential for seriality to be reconfigured in novel communicative contexts. [End Page 32] In much of the previous scholarship on serial narratives, the qualities of seriality are assumed rather than clearly defined. Hayward (1997), though, provides a starting point with her description of the serial as “an ongoing narrative released in successive parts” (3). Jones (2005) further suggests that there is usually a gap between one serial installment and the next and that the installments are often disseminated on a regular basis (e.g., publication may occur on repeated daily or weekly occasions). As Hayward’s description implies, in contrast with wider-scope discussions of the history of serial publication (Amiran 1997; Brake 2010), analyses of serial form mainly concern themselves with narrative examples rather than with other genres (such as expository discourse). Yet not all serial publication involves narratives. Simply producing a text in segments over time does not a narrative make: the content of that text must demonstrate narrativity. At its simplest, a narrative must report a temporally ordered sequence of events; however, as Ryan (2007) points out, a number of additional factors are oft en invoked as markers of narrativity, that is, the qualities that...

The Wire and Urban Health Education

As urban health has emerged as a distinct field, experts have collaborated to develop models for interdisciplinary education to train health professionals. Interdisciplinary learning is an important yet challenging imperative for urban health education. This paper explores lessons learned from a 2010 speaker series at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The television show, The Wire, was used as a teaching tool to illustrate the context of health disparities in American cities and to explore the complex factors perpetuating urban health outcomes. We suggest that individuals interested in developing interdisciplinary teaching models can learn from both the form and the content of The Wire. As a popular televised serial narrative, The Wire prompts an investigation into the forms and circulation of academic research in a fractured and specialized media landscape. The formal narrative structure of the show provides mental scaffolding from which epidemiological, historical, geographical, anthropological, and other relevant disciplinary learning can build. The Wire encourages critical reflection among public health professionals about the forces that shape public health training, research, and practice and offers creative expansions to existing urban health educational efforts.

Tensions of serial narrative in the new media system

Anàlisi is a science journal published by the Journalism and Communication Sciences Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). The journal has been published by the UAB Journalism Department since 1980. Anàlisi publishes science articles in the fields of the communication sciences: journalism, advertising and public relations, audiovisual communication, internet, multimedia and similar areas, always from the social and cultural viewpoint and following the theoretical and methodological approaches of the media studies disciplines. Anàlisi will especially value articles from competitive research projects, with a clear articulation of theory and methodology, a well-defined and up-to-date theoretical framework, and proposed as a significant contribution to their subject area and field.

Tensions of serial narrative in the new media system

Anàlisi is a science journal published by the Journalism and Communication Sciences Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). The journal has been published by the UAB Journalism Department since 1980. Anàlisi publishes science articles in the fields of the communication sciences: journalism, advertising and public relations, audiovisual communication, internet, multimedia and similar areas, always from the social and cultural viewpoint and following the theoretical and methodological approaches of the media studies disciplines. Anàlisi will especially value articles from competitive research projects, with a clear articulation of theory and methodology, a well-defined and up-to-date theoretical framework, and proposed as a significant contribution to their subject area and field.

Devaluing and revaluing seriality: The gendered discourses of media franchising

Gender anchors cultural negotiations over what media franchising is and how its serial production practices and narratives are valued. Cultural tensions between the economic viability and cultural legitimacy of seriality are both smoothed and exacerbated by the gendered discourses of media franchising. These discursive interventions are evidenced through examination of popular and trade talk about three television serials for which the term ‘franchise’ inflects, reworks, or disrupts the gendered values ascribed to them. First, although the CW’s Gossip Girl fits squarely into feminized models of serial narrative, franchise discourse claimed institutional and masculine legitimacy by stressing the economic rationality of its serial production. Second, in the case of ABC’s Lost, franchise discourse highlighted the serial repetition of industrialized culture production, challenging masculine valuation of the program based in perceptions of authenticity and singular artistic vision. Lastly, cultural backlash against Sci-Fi’s Battlestar Galactica demonstrates how franchise discourse has directly linked critique of serialized industrial production to moral panic about the feminine. Although dynamic franchise discourses have been deployed across an eclectic, even contradictory range of industrial and narrative practices, in common across each is that the accrual of serial value depends in great part upon gendered meanings ascribed to and by franchising.

The Posthumanity of “the Son of Man”: Heroes as Postmodern Apocalypse

Abstract: As a serial narrative, the TV series Heroes cannot end and yet its story is impossible without the continual threat of an end of the world. However, this inability to end also connects these narratives with biblical narratives of the end, which are always “apocalypse without apocalypse” (Derrida). Even in its ancient forms, this revelation that does not reveal is a postmodern phenomenon, as that which “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard). Although the show rarely cites the Bible, in juxtaposition to the biblical texts' “son of man” language, Heroes opens up an intertextual context through which the “sons of man” of Daniel 7 and elsewhere in the Bible acquire meaning as posthuman beings, even as the mysterious forces producing the TV show's varied characters are interrogated.

Alan Moore, Watchmen and some notes on the ideology of superhero comics

Popular comics, in the particular case of the 'superhero' genre here considered through the lens of Alan Moore's Watchmen comics novel, are mainly based on conservative ideological systems. This article focuses especially on some British and American comic books, which, by emphasizing the bourgeois ideological basis of superhero comics, have highlighted the limits of such comics and have made them possible to overcome. The article finds similarities and differences between the so-called 'supermen' of serial narratives and the Übermensch.

"The Status is Not Quo!": Pursuing Resolution in Web-Disseminated Serial Narrative

"The Status is Not Quo!":Pursuing Resolution in Web-Disseminated Serial Narrative Anouk Lang (bio) Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a three-act, 42-minute serialized musical which had its genesis in the Writers Guild of America strike in late 2007. Joss Whedon, writer and creator of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, funded the project himself and co-wrote the script and the songs with his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed's partner Maurissa Tancharoen. The three acts were disseminated via the internet on July 15, 17, and 19, 2008, with demand for Act I so high that it crashed the server on which it was hosted. Each act was freely available to view without ads for a little over a week, available to download through iTunes at low cost and thereafter available on DVD with a plethora of extras, including another entire scripted musical as a commentary track. The show's creators were explicit that this distribution model was a way of subverting the studio system and making use of new media opportunities for distribution, and Joss Whedon's loyal fanbase proved themselves willing co-conspirators, readily purchasing the download and DVD version in addition to merchandise.1 As with previous Whedon shows, the lines of communication with fans were kept open through announcements and updates on Twitter, on the Dr. Horrible website, and also through postings on fan sites.2 An enormous amount of paratextual material on the show exists across multiple media platforms in addition to the sites above—for instance the show's Facebook page, interviews in the mainstream press (see for example Whedon and Bianculli), and comments from the actors and writers made at the fan convention Comic-Con. The immersion of the text within the web enabled an ongoing dialogue to occur between viewers and the production team, and also among the viewers themselves. [End Page 367] Scholars of reception study are already well aware of internet-hosted fan discussions and of their potential as material for analysis (see for example Allington, Bury, and Davis). In this paper, I want to bring together reception study with insights from narratology and to use these discussions to show how so-called real readers engage with a narrative as it unfolds and search within it for coherence. As genres and modes of storytelling evolve alongside the development of new technologies, so fresh methodological opportunities arise for researchers to observe audience reactions to emergent textual forms. The unusual method of distribution for Dr. Horrible, coupled with the intense level of discussion on fan sites during and immediately after the week in which it was first aired, offers a unique reception context: the chance to "freeze-frame" audience reaction at particular points in the narrative and thereby gain insight into the ways readers engaged with different features of a story. Working together in a collective interpretive effort, readers drew on the kinds of interpretive practices taught in educational institutions and used their intertextual knowledge of other Whedon works to better understand aspects of Dr. Horrible which troubled them. The reception narratives that they articulated illustrate that textuality is not discrete and fixed at a single point in time: indeed, one of the most significant moves made by the readers considered here was shifting the text into a different generic category partway through their discussion in order to make it signify in a more satisfying way. Rather than fixed and stable texts, reception study takes as its object of study dynamic and open-ended textual processes, and as these pass from what John Frow terms "one regime of reading to another" (1), so too the meaning and value of a text remains in flux. As I will show, the viewers considered here demonstrated this fluidity in action: as they moved through the text and through the different interpretive frames which other readings offered them, they came to understand the text differently. Once the work to re-establish coherence had succeeded—for some readers at least—they were willing to allow the text to settle into something fixed. A brief description of the plot will help to contextualize the responses that follow...

Linguistic spatial classifications of event domains in narratives of crime

Structurally, formal definitions of the linguistic narrative minimally require two temporally linked past-timeevents. The role of spacein this definition, basedon spatial lan- guage indicating where events occur, is considered optional and non-structural. However, based on narratives with ah igh frequency of spatial language, recent research has ques- tioned this perspective, suggesting that space is more critical than may be readily apparent. Through an analysis of spatially rich serial criminal narratives, it will be demonstrated that spatial information qualitatively varies relative to narrative events. In particular, statistical classifiers in a supervised machine learning task achieve a 90% accuracy in predicting Pre-Crime, Crime, and Post-Crime events based on spatial (and temporal) information. Overall, these results suggest a deeper spatial organization of discourse, which not only provides practical event resolution possibilities, but also challenges traditional formal linguistic definitions of narrative.

Religious Self-Fashioning as a Motive in Early Modern Diary Keeping: The Evidence of Lady Margaret Hoby’s Diary 1599–1603

Although it has received little attention from scholars, the diary of Lady Margaret Hoby provides an invaluable insight into early modern English puritan piety. From its torn and faded entries a vivid narrative of early modern religiosity emerges. This article critically examines the influence that the diary and its religiosity exerted on the identity of Lady Margaret Hoby. Using evidence from the diary itself and Hoby’s social milieu as well as evidence found in contemporary conduct books, the diary is interpreted as a document in which Hoby fashioned a liberating self-identity, which contextualized her own existence, constructed via a serial narrative, within the eschatological meta-narrative of English Calvinism. Through this process it is suggested that the diary became a material site wherein Hoby’s religious self could be legitimized and maintained, protected from the political and religious uncertainties of Yorkshire in the last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign.

Editor's Column: Exploring Storyworlds across Media and Disciplines

Editor's Column:Exploring Storyworlds across Media and Disciplines David Herman Like the first issue of the journal, Storyworlds 2 features contributions by specialists in a range of fields for which narrative constitutes a key concern. Again, the emphasis is on documenting storytelling practices across a variety of media, and also on stimulating cross-disciplinary conversations about how to develop productive methods for analyzing and interpreting those practices. This double emphasis carries with it, in turn, a twofold benefit. On the one hand, it promotes efforts to identify core features of narrative—the commonalities that cut across all modes of storytelling—while fostering the use of multiple frameworks of inquiry to create a detailed, layered profile of those shared features. But on the other hand, exploring narratives across media and via different disciplines can also illuminate the particularities of a given environment for storytelling. Hence analysts can, even as they sift out basic and general features of narrative, examine the different ways in which those features may be instantiated—and how the differences in question affect (constrain but also enable) the process of building and engaging with narrative worlds. Collectively, the six articles assembled here investigate narrative practices both across media and by way [End Page vii] of diverse analytic frameworks. Working at the intersection of science studies and narrative theory, and focusing on turn-of-the-twentieth-century narratives of conversion (in the broad sense of personal trans-formation), H. Porter Abbott explores how those attempts to narrate conversion experiences relate to two models of change: (1) the gradualist model influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory and (2) modernist "momentism," grounded in a logic of sudden alteration and radical discontinuity. After a probing discussion of how narrative modes of representation break down when they are brought to bear on events that exceed a certain scale of complexity or compression, Abbott suggests that the momentist paradigm for understanding conversion is not so much a reaction against Darwinian gradualism as a "way to acknowledge its causal complexity—a complexity so extreme as to frustrate all efforts to narrativize it without distortion." Next, Richard J. Gerrig shifts the focus from a discussion of how modes of narration might have been shaped by scientific paradigms to a discussion of how humanistic research on narrative can both inform and be informed by empirical research on text processing. Examining three kinds of narrative gaps—those associated with readers' inferences beyond the information given, those created when initial mentions of characters withhold details about their roles in the story, and those stemming from unreliable narration—Gerrig makes a case for closer collaboration between literary narratologists and text-processing researchers. Arguably, it will require cross-disciplinary cooperation of this sort to (dis)confirm hypotheses concerning how various sorts of narrative structures and techniques shape readers' experiences. Moving from monomodal print texts to multimodal graphic narratives, Karin Kukkonen draws on another area of inquiry pioneered by psychologists—namely, research on mental models—to explore interpretive challenges posed to readers of superhero comics. These comics were produced serially over many decades, by different sets of creators, resulting in more or less obvious discontinuities and inconsistencies. Kukkonen examines how interpreters can use cues deployed by the comics' creators to navigate this superhero "multiverse," which features not a baseline reality and various counterfactual scenarios but rather multiple parallel realities inhabited by any number of character versions. Sean O'Sullivan continues Kukkonen's investigation of the affordances and constraints presented by serial narratives, but he focuses on the medium [End Page viii] of television rather than comics. Seeking to develop new tools for the study of television serials, O'Sullivan argues that shows such as Six Feet Under and The Sopranos can be analyzed as prosodic structures. Thus the recent innovation of the thirteen-episode season can be compared with the fourteen-line sonnet, with clusters of episodes functioning like stanzas in those "sonnet-seasons." Similarly, recurrent thematic and plot-related elements can be likened to beats distributed in a metrical pattern—by analogy with the pattern that governs, more or less stringently, the individual lines of a sonnet. Apostolos Doxiadis also looks to the patterns of poetry—specifically, narrative poetry—in...

Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences

This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience interpretation, consumption and attachment. This shift in focus parallels a similar move in cultural studies made several years prior. Therefore, this paper advocates combining theories from cultural studies with empirical studies of concern to popular geopolitics to further our understanding. Specifically outlined as a possibility in this paper is the viewing of nationalism and religion as forms of fan-based identities, in that both can be understood as adherence to serial narratives. This perspective carries several corollaries regarding methodology and object of study, most notably a concern with the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts.

Fighting for the story's life

This article develops the concept of non-closure in sustained news stories, based on the case study of Ron Arad, an Israeli soldier who was taken captive in 1986 and whose story still continues to produce headlines in the Israeli press. Coverage of the Arad case was examined in the three major Israeli daily newspapers for a period of 17 years, and the textual mechanisms through which the story has been kept alive were identified. The article offers an analysis of three central non-closure strategies: maintaining suspense, thickening the plot, and keeping the protagonist alive. It is suggested that these strategies enhance readers' involvement with the journalistic texts and function as a bridge between the ritual and information transmission functions of news. Non-closure is thus conceptualized as a force that operates alongside the well-studied forces of closure and renders individual news pieces as episodes in a serial narrative rather than self-contained narrative units.

Cannibals and Kitchen Sinks

rom serial killers to disease narratives to organ transplants to the spread of mad cow disease, flesh-eating (in one form or another) pervades twentiethand twenty-first-century existence," Priscilla Walton asserts in her book Our Cannibals, Ourselves (152). As this disparate list suggests, Walton's focus is less on literal cannibalistic acts and practices than it is on "diffuse and metaphoric" (28) deployments of anthropophagous imagery throughout contemporary popular culture. In seven brief yet wide-ranging chapters, Walton surveys cannibal symbolism in classic literary and travel narratives, in coverage of modern pandemics such as Ebola fever, in popular alien-invasion and vampire stories, in panics over mad cow disease, in representations of eating disorders, in serial killers narratives, and in contemporary consumer culture generally, dominated as it is by "various media frenzies and the compulsion to devour" (7). Many of the connections Walton makes, and a number of her readings of what is admittedly an impressively broad range of materials, are quite arresting, but her tendency to treat cannibalism in such a flexible way, to find the metaphor in such a scattered assortment of sites, ultimately fatally attenuates the concept. Walton herself seems at times concerned that her focus is too vague and wandering. "Although it might seem a stretch to move from flesh-eating to self-starvation," she comments in a section on anorexia nervosa, "it is imperative to remember that when the body