Voices from the margins: seriality and the introductory writing classroom

Item Type Thesis

Authors Cameron, Casie E.

Download date 03/10/2021 21:53:19

Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/10483 VOICES FROM THE MARGINS: SERIALITY AND THE INTRODUCTORY WRITING

CLASSROOM

By

Casie E. Cameron, B.A.

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

Master of Arts

In

English

University of Alaska Fairbanks

May 2019

© 2019 Casie E. Cameron

APPROVED:

Sarah Stanley, Committee Chair Rich Carr, Committee Member Eileen Harney, Committee Member Rich Carr, Chair Department of English Todd Sherman, Dean College of Liberal Arts Michael Castellini, Dean of the Graduate School Abstract

In an era of great political division and fear of the “other,” how can introductory writing classes do a better job of foregrounding marginalized voices and building classroom communities that value many different life experiences over the one presented in dominant discourse? By employing select features of the serial form including: worldbuilding for community, use of devices of continuity to bridge part-whole segmentation, and cyclical communication and recursive writing practices, voices and stories from the margins can break into dominant discourse.

This paper begins and ends with my own story as it is spun and woven through the chapters. Between interludes, I initiate a layered exploration defining the origins and scope of the serial form, establish terms and identify storytelling devices that serials rely on for long-term, overarching, and influential success. Turning then to iterations of the modern serial, I explore the continued development of devices of continuity (the cliffhanger and the recap), develop further ideas of cyclical communication, and clarify how the modern serial is tied firmly with capitalism. After an analysis of the evolution of the serial form and its constituent parts, I suggest ways of incorporating certain strategies and devices of the serial form into the introductory writing classroom in order to build community; establish a cyclical, serialized communication through writing and sharing our individual stories; and normalizing outside voices.

The implications of this investigation are that pedagogical repurposing of select devices of the serial can support writing instructors' efforts to amplify voices and stories from the margins bringing them into dominant discourse.

i Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Table of Contents ...... ii Acknowledgments...... iii

Prelude ...... 1

I. Introduction...... 3

Interlude ...... 6

II. Seriality's Source: Origins and Scope of the Serial Novel ...... 9 Worldbuilding Towards Community ...... 12 Weaving Continuity through Cliffhangers...... 19 The Function of the Serial Novel...... 20

Interlude ...... 22

III. Key Features of an Evolving Form: Origins and Scope of the Modern Serial ...... 26 The Modern Serial and the Evolution of Worldbuilding ...... 28 Development of Devices of Continuity in the Modern Serial ...... 30 The Function of the Modern Serial ...... 34

Interlude ...... 39

IV. Seriality in the Introductory Writing Classroom ...... 41 Creating Space for New Voices through Worldbuilding ...... 42 Audiences, Community, and the Recursive Writing Practice...... 47 Devices of Continuity in the Serial Writing Classroom ...... 54

Finale ...... 58

Works Cited ...... 60

ii Acknowledgments

For a long time, I thought about Einstein. Ellarae and I spoke about him and his relationship to my notion of what seriality could be at length during the summer of

2017. Einstein's theory of relativity describes the phenomenon of space curving around a giant body of mass, like a trampoline curves around the weight of a bowling ball sitting on its surface.

The similarities between the curvature of space near a massive body and the way new ideas— often experienced as equally massive—change the possibilities of the viewer's future trajectory are striking. Mikhail Bakhtin's 1937 essay, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the

Novel,” in which he theorizes the chronotope (literally time-space), helped me ground Einstein's relativity in written storytelling forms through his consideration of the epic, the hero adventure, and the comedy. Although Bakhtin's chronotope was formative in my study of seriality, I am not only interested in establishing foundational seriality theory but also exploring the capacity of potential applications.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason discusses the serial via an example of

serialities, groupings of individuals related not through shared goals but through practico-inert objects and shared experiences within a physical space, gave me valuable insight into the individual experiences and knowledge-ways each student brings with them. Iris Marion Young's

1994 essay, "Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective" was one of the first explorations of seriality I read and provided my first ideas of how I would write about

seriality in the classroom; she too, incidentally, found inspiration in Sartre's ideas, writing about him at length in this paper.

Over the last three years, I have sought out writings by Paulo Freire, James Berlin, Patricia

Boyd, Peter Elbow, bell hooks, and Roz Ivanic. Other influences during this time include Judith

iii Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Halberstam, Adrienne Rich, Gertrude Stein, Virginia

Woolf, Slavoj Žižek, Sean O'Sullivan, Gloria Anzaldua, Ania Loomba, Helene Cixous, Gayle

Rubin, and Luce Irigaray among others.

Sometimes I thought my head would explode. It felt too large with ideas unyielding to an outlet. Looking back, when I first approached Dr. Sarah Stanley (who ultimately served as my thesis advisor), she seemed to immediately have a clear vision of what my thesis might look like. To me, it was a nebulous cloud of disjointed—nascent nuggets of ideas netted together into clusters of light and fog—that I could not yet interpret. Perhaps I lacked objectivity; I was too close. Over a long series of meetings, many hundreds of words written, and many conversations,

I still couldn't see it. Her accepting guidance and willingness to say “yes” to some of even my strangest ideas kept me going towards my goal, even when the journey was most perilous and slow-moving.

I want to thank the other members of my committee: Dr. Rich Carr, and Dr. Eileen

Harney. Rich, I appreciate your ardent support of my academic pursuits and career. I am humble to have had the privilege of working with you in many capacities during my time as a master's student in the English department. Thank you for your willingness to meet me where I am and for your humor. Eileen, thank you for your unwavering support even when I disappeared for months at a time, you are a gallant champion for self-care which I greatly appreciate. I always left our meetings feeling energized and ready to try again.

Ellarae, in innumerable ways I should thank you first (but I wanted to group you with family, where you belong). Without your love and support, I would not have been able to start or complete this twisting and winding journey. Thank you for spending hours listening to me talk about how everything is "because of seriality" and for the time you spent talking me down

iv from upsets after hard days of writing. Each moment, your unfailing belief in me was tangible. I appreciate you more than I can express. To my mother, father, brother, sister, their partners, and the joys: though we are far apart physically, you are never far from my mind even during this, our most extended separation. You are always in my heart wherever I am.

v Prelude

I was born northeast of the San Ysidro/Tijuana border in San Diego, California, at the dawn of the 1980s. My hometown, Lakeside, California, was and is still the epitome of a rodeo town—as a child, we got our milk directly from one of two dairies in town. Nestled at the bottom of El Capitan Mountain at the head of the El Monte Valley, Lakeside is surrounded on two sides by the Barona and Viejas reservation lands, once poverty-stricken and expansive, today besmirched with mega casinos and outlet malls. Away down, on a third side, is Mexico. In addition to being the former home of the largest wind chime in the world, Lakeside—also known as the "skinhead capital of California"—is full of desperately scared white people who are sure the "Mexicans" are coming to take their jobs. Many Lakesidians are concerned about

"wetbacks" escaping Mexico through their backyards; many wholeheartedly support President

Trump's wall despite personally benefiting from the cheap labor of immigrants for delicious foods, like tacos. I felt suffocated and trapped in my hometown, and from my perspective, I could see that there was no room for any differences. I knew no one that was different. There was no room for different religions, sexual orientations, or other traditions. There was no room for anyone who did not fit the narrowly defined white, Christian, heterosexual mold.

I was a tomboy. I played in the shadows dashed down on the dry yellow ground, hopping from shade to shadier trying to stay ahead of the heat. I wore dirty jeans and t-shirts like the boys, and I could climb any tree. Because I wasn't what people considered to be a normal child,

I was disciplined, often berated into being something different from who I am. Grandma

Cameron was always trying to regulate how I sat, spoke, spat with a constant disappointed refrain: "that's not lady-like." In her mind I merely needed to be taught manners. In my mind, I knew what was expected of girls, but I didn't feel like that was a good enough reason to

1 conform. Boys (who also wore dirty jeans) could sit with their legs crossed over the knee—and,

I decided, so could I.

It was decisions like this combined with the rage I felt at the double standard of treatment of girls versus boys growing up that earned me the moniker “the Beast,” or sometimes I was just

“beastly.” “Culture is made by those in power—men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them” (Anzaldua 1018). Women must act like women, and men must act like men. The pressure to conform was intense from all angles. I hid my story; my existence as a queer kid in

Lakeside was, for the most part, spent in hiding, in fear of being unwanted and unseen, even if I put myself out there; no one wanted the 4.0 student, athlete, artist to be different. No one wanted to deal with that—least of all me. No wonder I was angry. I could not tell my story. I couldn't tell it because I wasn't sure how much of the reason I had a home and a family was because I could pass. I wasn't sure if the dominant narrative and what other people might think of us would prevail over the relationship I had with my parents and family, or if they would be able to love me anyway. I had no way of providingfor myself if my coming out did not go well.

2 I. Introduction

One and a half years ago, just shy of a year into my master's program in English at the

University of Alaska Fairbanks, I brought an unformed jumbled inkling of what I wanted my thesis to be to my thesis advisor. I knew I wanted to incorporate my interest in the serial form, spurred by an embarrassing obsession with reality television, with my interest in pedagogy but I could not see a way forward. The way ahead lies in my story, as it always has. As I wrote my story, my argument emerged in parallel. It seems as though it was always there, waiting to be discovered, hidden under layers of personal history and my own life experiences.

Writing this thesis has taken two and a half years of reading, research, collaboration, and conversation, and leading up to that, many tens of hours sampling and steeping myself in ideas

surrounding the popular seriality I have witnessed take shape and mature into its current form around me. I wrote in segments at first, installations of a serial, almost. Reflection on formative events in my past and their relationship to my life today has shaped what this thesis has become.

But is more than that, as well. This exploration locates the origins of the serial form in Victorian

England tracing them to today's long-form dramatic serials like AMC's The Walking Dead

(2010-2018), HBO's Game of Thrones, and Netflix's productions Orange is the New Black and

Ozark. The serial has grown alongside popular culture since the serial novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, used as a tool to aid in the buttressing and propagation of the dominant discourse.

The American Dream narrative many students consume in homes, in schools, and in the media—including many examples of the serial form—diverges from the many forms real life takes; the house, spouse, car, 2.5 kids, a dog, and the white picket fence to feel safe behind are only attainable by a shrinking privileged group. The mainstream narrative, "everyone can be

3 successful if they work hard enough," clashes with the realities of poverty, an unequal and overburdened justice system, a for-profit prison system, an increasingly for-profit education system, unequal opportunity across racial-, gender-, socio-economic-, and geographic-groups, and long-standing institutionalized racism and homophobia. In this era, we are seemingly more connected than ever; it is easy to reach each other with a phone call, text, email, and through any number of social media sites, gaming, blogging, and picture sharing apps. Yet, despite these devices and applications meant to link us, we end up farther apart and more divided than ever before.

It is easy to neglect the stories of the many amidst the innumerable fabricated and reinforcing narratives the American Dream reproduced and perpetuated endlessly in our daily lives. It is imperative that the stories we do not hear, the voices from the margins that have no platform, are not forgotten or swept away because they are inconvenient or painful or require integrating new ways of thinking. A seriality of stories holds the key to our humanity, and these diverse narratives need to be illuminated and foregrounded; they must be allowed to breathe in the light for all to see so we can learn from their infinite permutations. As I explored how serials work towards transmitting dominant discourse, I began to notice how the serial form often also makes room for new voices and alternative stories and how the potential pedagogical function within the context of the introduction to writing classroom.

Heretofore, the modern serial has been used by countless industries and multinational corporations to sell us both their products and the values and ideologies from which they profit.

Corporations, very much like politicians, will not invest money into something that does not return a profit. One of the most substantial pieces of evidence that the serial form works toward capitalist ends is the sheer amount of money spent deploying seriality by powerful production

4 companies, networks, and capitalist projects. I propose using key features of seriality as a means for listening to today's students and bringing a multiplicity of personal stories into common discourse. It is time to apply some of the same strategies the serial form uses to sell us on super­ consumerism towards bringing outside, marginalized, and oppressed voices and their stories into daily discourse. As Frank Kelleter says in his 2017 essay “From Recursive Progression to Systemic

Self-observation: Elements of a Theory of Seriality,” “[W]hat we call culture is fundamentally dependent on the repetition and variation of narratives” (99). I will apply the serial form towards building an open classroom culture and for telling stories that are not always told. I hope to find an answer to the need for educational environments that must do better at providing space for encountering multiple voices as well as for telling stories that have been silenced. This exploration will not reference any formative theory of seriality because, as of yet, there is none.

After a youth pockmarked by the trenchant tongues of others' words balled up and pea­ shot at me, the potential for affecting the dynamic of misunderstanding and bigotry through new practices in the writing classroom is a surprising balm to my inner outsider. If there had been a place where people could have listened to and heard my story, I would have felt heard and valued for what makes me uniquely me. We must tell our stories to each other in order to recognize our collective, yet dismembered humanity. We must repair what has been dismembered; we must re-member.

5 Interlude

The language arts station in my 4th-grade classroom was my favorite place to be on any given day. I loved sliding a blank, unlined, piece of newsprint out of the manila folder that held the bundle of paper together. I wrote endless short stories and drew the accompanying illustrations every chance I got. This experience was the first time I remember feeling that the blank page was a safe space, an infinitely inspiring space—freedom.

At 13 I began to journal. I carried around a series of half-page sized spiral bound notebooks, navy blue, lined, with 250 pages apiece. I filled the pages, motivated by my acute teen angst. Within each notebook, I grappled freely with daily goings-on, life events, and the larger more nebulous questions of my sexuality and of the future. There are some pretty embarrassing poems and musings on everything from the latest episode of Star Trek the Next

Generation (my favorite) to personal explanations of things like why I didn't want my boyfriend

James to kiss me. As I got deeper into my teens, I got deeper into the personal with my writing.

I felt, often, that once out of my head and on the page, I was able to take power over the words, ideas, thoughts that whirred in my mind offering a few moments respite. Once the words in my head were on the page, I often gained perspective, and through this process, I came out on the other end of any given situation with a clearer idea of how Ifelt and how I wanted to proceed than before I began writing.

When I turned sixteen—in addition to the blank page—freedom was a white 1989

Volkswagen Fox. My world was vast and getting bigger. With my learner's permit, I could escape my little town. I would drive to Hillcrest and peruse the gay bookshops, sit in Euphoria, a coffee shop where all the young queers would gather to hang out until they kicked us out at 1 am, or go to a Gay Youth Anonymous (GYA) meeting and support group at the Gay and Lesbian

6 Center. It didn't take long until I was a regular volunteer at the Center and a frequent, if furtive,

customer at Obelisk, a queer book, music, andfilm shop—a paragon of a once vibrant species.

At first, the walk up to the bookstore always filled my belly with what felt like swarming,

stinging hordes of wasps; the approach to the front door made me feel peculiar and deviant

navigating the throes of my excited-anxious anticipation. Upon entering, I would exchange

conspiratorial glances with the cashier and scan around the bookstore in case I needed to dart

outside to avoid someone I knew. When I was sure that all was clear, I would begin my journey

through the shelves. I remember being apprehensive of going directly to the lesbian literature

section, so I would browse the periphery of the store, busying myself with tchotchkes and gag­ gifts before weaving my way to the very section, at the center of the bookshop, of my desire.

Aside from the joy offinding books written by and about people like me, with characters whose experiences mirrored mine, my excitement at visiting Obelisk, when it was open—during

the mid- to late-nineties—stemmed mostly from the prospect of being visible andfinding

representation in stories I could surround myself with and learn from. In the redneck rodeo

town where I was born, differences were to be avoided at any cost. Differences were dangerous;

exhibiting differences--especially sexual orientation differences—threatens the heteronormative

binary that grasps the people of Lakeside in a stranglehold with its tight, short-sighted fist.

Obelisk was different; here I yearned to be noticed. I wanted someone to see me, to see the real

me. I wanted them to see through the facade I grew up learning to project. I wanted them to

shine a light into my closet and to listen—really listen—to my story. The books I read and the people I met during my many visits to this safe-place provided me the visibility I needed. My

experience in Obelisk reinforced in me the idea that freedom exists in the telling of our stories.

It taught me that there are platforms from which to spread this message. Through language on

7 the page, I discovered the representation for which I had searched, and I gleaned the direction I needed for surviving my high school experience from these authors and their characters: Leslie

Feinberg, Radclyffe Hall, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Alison Bechdel,

Diane DiMassa, Adrienne Rich, Fannie Flagg andfrom many musicians I would play nonstop on my walkman but especially Dar Williams, Catie Curtis, The Indigo Girls, and Ani DiFranco.

8 II. Seriality's Source: Origins and Scope of the Serial Novel

It is essential to see what the serial's moving parts look like and how those parts function from the beginning of the form and as it has evolved through time in order to trace how audiences have been habituated to the features of the serial and how an audience's thinking can be influenced by the serial, and thereby to understand how seriality can be applied in a writing classroom setting, it is imperative to first begin with the history of the serial form. We must start here because just as we are products of our history, so too is the serial form. Changing economics in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England, including urbanization, increased literacy rates, and the golden era of the steam engine created the perfect conditions for the popular rise of the serial novel. Waves of people relocated to cities for jobs. New ideas percolated widely among diverse groups during a time of great creativity. Industry boomed, manufacturing flourished, and the printed word held glorious new power. Periodicals of all sorts flourished with large readerships and wide circulation. Weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies, dailies all vied for a large readership and loyal subscribers. Competing serialized novels began to appear in journals in England by such well-known and loved authors as Sir Walter Scott,

William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Serial novels were published in two ways: those released in a periodical complete with advertisements and other content, and those issued in individual, stand-alone installments. Both were new strategies that enabled middle-class readers to purchase novels that had previously been too expensive except for the very wealthiest citizens, clergy, and nobility. Most installments sold for very little, spreading the cost of an entire novel over a year or two. Publishers were poised and willing to fulfill their readers' desires and stood to make a wealth of success and money in the process. It was said of Dickens, that “in some novels, such

9 as Martin Chuzzlewit, he even made changes in response to public feedback” (Gravil

83). Dickens' creative changes in response to public criticism exemplifies the circular communication that exists between author and reader—enabled as a byproduct of the time element in a serial novel. Publishers were incentivized to print popular stories. If publishers did not respond well to audience feedback, it was not uncommon to lose readership. Editors preferred writers who were willing to write to their audiences' tastes. It made sense to publishers and authors to become more sensitive to the needs and desires of their audience to ensure the best sales and a loyal readership.

At the beginning of the era of the serial novel, there was no standardized format regarding length; individual magazines followed an irregular policy in this respect. The origins of the serial form are rooted in the discourses surrounding the nineteenth-century novel and, often explicitly, attributed to Charles Dickens' and his works. Charles Dickens' serial novel,

Bleak House (1852—1853) ran for nineteen monthly installments, the last a double issue. Dickens' ability for connecting readers with his well-developed quirky characters, and detailed plotlines was second only to the mark he made on the serial form; his contributions influenced both the Victorian serial and touch even today's modern serial iterations. Soon,

Victorian readers began to expect a standard format for serial novels: nineteen stand-alone monthly parts of exactly thirty-two pages of text and two illustrations, and sixteen or more pages of advertising. The final installment of a serial novel, at a price tag of two shillings, was a double issue; the twentieth installation would include more text and illustrations as well as front matter including: a preface, dedication, table of contents, and a list of illustrations.

Times were ripe for new ideas, new voices, new forms of entertainment, and new approaches to storytelling. The serial form is adept at conveying stories with values that

10 diverge—even if only by a small margin—from the dominant narrative by bringing outside voices to the forefront over time through worldbuilding; continuity devices like the cliffhanger, and the recap; and how the serial can provide a means of giving room to voices outside of dominant discourse. This chapter is dedicated to exploring the origins and scope of the serial form—spanning from Victorian novels to now as the preeminent tool of capitalist pop culture today—and will trace how the serial form has evolved into its current iteration.

The history of the serial is important because it mirrors the way our popular-media­ consuming selves have shifted towards consumerism, demanding ever more out of our lives. It offers echoes of the same journey students take while constructing their perceptions of reality.

Realities are ordered and shaped by a lifetime of events and ideas and people and experiences that contribute to molding every individual's perception of reality. Students' histories, what they bring with them to the classroom, are intimate individual journeys that follow a trajectory similar to the serial. It is repetitive; the serial form and human experience both grow. The high degree of interconnectivity between the serial and our everyday lives demonstrates how enculturated and ensconced within certain discourses people can become. It is essential to recognize the

scope of the serial because as far as its influences reach into our lives, we reach back into the

serial form. Nothing that grows exists in a moment in time as it will always and forever exist.

Each twist and turn of a history—a cumulative experience (maybe a life experience)—of an entity (a person or a narrative form) creates something new or destroys something old, resulting in a new way of seeing, interacting with, or appreciating that entity. People often use the phrase

“I can't unsee that,” when confronted with something disruptive to them. This might be a new piece of music, a new person, or a new idea that challenges previous conceptions and inspires

11 new futures one could have not imagined prior. Context is important because it determines the shape one thing takes in relation to the shapes of other things. Our future is built on our past.

Worldbuilding Towards Community

Ample time is devoted to creating the location, the world within which any particular serial's action takes place. Worldbuilding involves establishing the context in which the world of the serial novel operates; it establishes the fundamental semiology for the sustained narrative. In the serial novel, for example, there is an intense worldbuilding period in the beginning, that teleports the reader directly into the novel's world. After this, worldbuilding occurs over time, gradually interspersed in temporally dislocated increments throughout the scope of the narrative. For example, in Charles Dickens' serial novel Bleak House, the initial view of London closes in on a dark Lincoln's Inn Hall before floating with the fog through the grimy streets to a longer perspective over the Thames and beyond to the coast. The motif of fog at the beginning sets the pervasive tone of the novel. In each of these scene-setting instances, the worldbuilding continues for the reader. The endless process of learning, forgetting, and remembering follows the rhythm of the monthly installments over time. In the center of London and the center of the novel—in that the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case is a central plot feature—is Chancery. The laws of Bleak House's world are quickly ascertained: there is a strict separation between classes, and separate realms coexist with little contact between them. Characters are moving cogs in a machine that consumes them. The setting, in its shifting focus, runs from familiar landmarks to a disquieting, uncanny sense that nothing is as the reader knows it. Our initial tour through the city provides a tantalizing momentum from which the narrative will spring. We begin in

Chancery, a world that becomes increasingly comprehensible, as we gain familiarity with its

12 characters and their general movement. The poor air quality—smoke and fog—that permeates the novel is immediately at the forefront.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, Undistinguishable in mire... Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. (Bleak House 13) After even just the first lines of the first chapter, the context and grey tone, vivid in Dickens' telling, provides a strong foundation for the world within which the rest of the narrative will take place. Most readers of Bleak House and other serial novels did not live in the places depicted. The dreary, mean streets of London, Tom's-all-Alone loom large on the landscape of the novel and would have added to the novel's popular allure.

Serial literature largely reproduces and upholds dominant discourse. It is intricately entwined with the economics and the desires of the populace. As Ernst von Glaserfeld claims,

“All concepts that involve repetition are dependent on a particular point of view, namely what is being considered, and in respect of what sameness is demanded" (12). It is precisely the combination of repetition techniques and stylistic routines that produces normalizing effects

13 which, in the case of modern serial forces, can pull the trajectory of, semiology, meaning­ making, and culture in one direction or another, or even to alter what we experience as normal.

Serial novels were often deployed to uphold the dominant discourse, but Bleak House satirizes the unsanitary conditions and bureaucratic red-tape of 19th century England, resisting the status quo by offering a narrative critical of the world that it mirrors. Bleak House is a novel impatient for reform and indignant with the state of England as well as being one of the earliest fictional engagements with the field of public health. Written between two national epidemics of cholera, in 1849 and 1854, attention Dickens pays to the need for sanitary reform (specifically for a regulated, clean supply of public water) is not accidental. Serial novels of the Victorian era provided even the lower classes a location from which they could engage in contemporary political discourse. Discussing what one thought about the latest installment of Oliver Twist or

Bleak House became a way of debating societal norms and the state of London from an individual's perspective—what we might now call water-cooler conversation.

Repeated exposure to the fog of London, the world full of grotesques, amiable idiots, and morally corrupt monsters populating the pages of Bleak House, builds relationships that thicken and take shape over time. Serials harness the power of time and visibility, unfolding in similar ways as humans form, process, and store memory, and form bonds of affiliation. The familiarity of recursive and repeating elements can be comforting for audiences leading them to seek out the experience repeatedly. Repetition provides readers at least a sense that they will enjoy the text- to-come as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Humans use memories to determine the trajectory of their futures, so it takes time to build a foundation from which an audience can learn to empathize with characters they encounter.

14 Continuity and intimacy are two of the serial form's specific strengths—particularly the duration and care with which serials can develop characters and engage viewers emotionally. Each characteristic—continuity and intimacy—facilitates bringing voices from the margins into the body of our discourse and featuring narratives that may otherwise not be given a platform. Especially in serials with a large cast of characters, there is greater probability that a character outside of the dominant discourse will be featured within the narrative. Characters who flash past us in Bleak House—a man from Shropshire, a poverty-stricken crossing sweeper—sharpen into detail, acquire names, and fill out their being in time and space; Bleak

House feels simultaneously ordered and dynamic. As the ties between networks of characters thicken, the novel-world seems to shrink, becoming more recognizable for readers but also more dangerous for the characters we love. As we read, we focus more closely on the main characters, and their stories emerge from the fog, as it were, and to the forefront.

The intimacy of the serial, fostered by the audience's building interaction with the world and contexts of the narrative, mimics the way humans form relationships in real life. As each encounter with a new acquaintance yields new bits of information about her or him, over time and repeated interactions, reciprocal bonds form. The relationship between a reader and her or his experience of a serial novel, or modern serial, is built on exposure through temporal continuity rather than spontaneous sympathies or superficial identification. Readers feel more deeply when introduced or exposed to a character or a concept repeatedly over some time.

Audiences' temporal experiences of the characters are condensed into the lines on a page, yet they create the illusion of a deep, interpersonal relationship built over time—the feelings of a relationship without one.

15 The stories populating the heart of Bleak House are unwanted stories. These central stories are not only palatable histories of well-to-do characters living carefree lives in the upper echelons of society, but stories of those living in literal or figurative mire take a central role. Because of the marginal status of some of his characters, Dickens must first build these characters' credibility with his audience before their stories come to light. The narratives revolving around the question of Esther Summerson's parentage, Lady Honoria Dedlock and

Captain Hawdon's affair, Jo the street sweeper's life and death, among others, are the stories that bring the novel to life. They provide the strawman-figures that play out the meat of Dickens' commentary. Over time, and often all too slowly, serials tend towards character diversity.

Serials also have many subplots and main plots, often feature surprising reversals, scandals, or revelations that keep the audience reaching for the next installment. Serials are able to create social bonds around the recursive content they present. Acting, in this case, against the alienating effects of capitalism and the industrial revolution by bringing out stories from the margins that society would prefer to not recognize.

A couple of examples from Bleak House are the stories of Lady Honoria Dedlock (nee

Barbary), and poor Jo, a lowly street sweeping orphan. Lady Dedlock, revered and wealthy, has kept the secret of bearing an illegitimate child throughout her life, having been told that her infant died in childbirth. The revelation of Lady Dedlock's past drives much of the plot. Her character is a familiar figure in Victorian literature, the fallen woman, a woman with a past that catches up with her. Lady Dedlock discovers that the child lived and learns her name is Esther

Summerson. In the rumble about a secret predating the Dedlock's marriage, Lady Dedlock attracts the toxic curiosity of Sir Leicester Dedlock's lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn, who feels bound by loyalty to his client, Sir Leicester Dedlock (Lady Dedlock's husband), to pry out her

16 secret. When the truth comes out, Lady Dedlock runs away. She dies outside the cemetery where her lover (Esther Summerson's father), Captain Hawdon, "Nemo," lies buried. In her own mind, Lady Dedlock dies disgraced, believing her life to be irredeemable. She believes she is pursued for a murder she did not commit, and that Sir Leicester hates her for her secrets. Lady

Dedlock feared the disgrace these secrets could cast upon the Dedlock name. In adherence with what dominant society required, Lady Dedlock has been disallowed from telling her story and subsequently been denied a life in which she may have been happier and freer to tell her truth.

She is persecuted and dies reunited, so to speak, with Captain Hawdon, at the gate of his gravesite. It was necessary for Lady Dedlock to hide her story at all costs, simply because her story threatens the societal dictates within which she lived.

Jo, a young boy who lives on the streets of Tom's-all-alone, seems at first like a passing figure in the crowded London streets. The street sweeper's character soon fleshed out and connected to many others integral to the momentum of the plot. He is arguably the most tragic figure in the novel. The boy, an orphan, is vulnerable and unprotected; people, disease, and the horrors of poverty all threaten his life and wellbeing. Even his unlikely knowledge of some of the facts surrounding the novel's mystery brings him even more trouble. Jo's presence in the novel connects people who otherwise would not ever meet. At the inquest, he links Nemo,

Tulkinghorn, and Snagsby. By showing the veiled woman (Lady Dedlock) around, he links her with Snagsby and Guster. Snagsby's charity to Jo connects Guppy with Snagsby and the

Chadbands, which, in turn, leads Guppy to surmise Esther and Lady Dedlock's relationship. By bringing medicine to Jenny, Jo is linked to the neighborhood around Bleak House, and so to

Esther and Jarndyce.

17 Despite his low status—Jo is removed from all things that create a society and bring people together—this insignificant and powerless boy is essential to the novel's most important events. The court magistrates disbelieve him, treating him as less than human because he is uneducated, harassed by the constables, and pursued and harried by Tulkinghorn. Jo's death scene is a superb combination of a realistic, poignant, and incredibly melodramatic end to a wasted life marked by honest goodness: "Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day" (734). A blameless symbol of the evils of poverty, Jo is a familiar figure to readers of Dickens' work. The other characters in the novel refuse to focus on the poverty, unsanitary conditions, and contagious disease in their city and the plight of Londoners around them. The story of poverty in society is swept aside as so much rubbish under Jo's broom.

It is not that Lady Dedlock and Jo get to tell their stories, as neither of them is afforded that agency within the pages of this novel, but their outside-the-norm stories are told and are cherished by their readership. The world created for this serial was successfully comprehensive and accurate enough to elicit a dedicated readership. Bursting with subjects considered embarrassing, and shameful, topics that are suppressed, hidden, and kept a secret to the great detriment of numerous characters, Bleak House enjoyed the largest readership and circulation numbers of any of Dickens' other novels. Sales of Bleak House's first episode exceeded 38,000 dropping to about 34,000 per month thereafter, and though it is difficult to estimate the size of the first book edition in Britain, it is safe to say that Bleak House was one of the greatest successes of Dickens's career (Butts 86). Their stories of poverty, abandonment, silence, and love lost are told in their full, tragic humanity, and with great empathy for the

18 characters. Foregrounding these stories—even amidst the rest of the novel's bustle—brings some of the worst of society's ills: poverty, abandonment, illness, and disparity into an emerging discourse. The serial project, Bleak House, succeeded at bringing outside voices and stories to the forefront by building a world for them to exist within a world set up in contrast to the "real" world of the readers. Its reception despite, or because of, these alternative stories and the satiric shadow they cast on the state of the city at the time is a testament to the power of the serial form.

Weaving Continuity through Cliffhangers

Serial novels, like Bleak House, are characteristically rife with breaks in the narrative. These breaks, usually the time between the discreet serial issues, are often set-off with cliffhangers meant to launch the reader with enough momentum to carry them through until the next installment is released. The themes of these nascent cliffhangers ranged widely, but frequently featured an exceedingly dramatic event: a wedding, a birth, spontaneous combustion, or a scandalous event like an affair. Ostensibly, the cliffhanger functions like this: the storyline begins to ramp up to a significant event over many installments. Anxiety builds with the feeling that something big is coming. That something happens, and the installment ends, leaving the readers in an unfulfilled state—they must know what will happen... but the arc is not completed until the next installment. Reading Bleak House in its original parts makes clear Dickens' use of cliffhanger style endings to entice readers to purchase future numbers. A typical example is the ending of the tenth issue at which point Krook, the owner of a rag-and-bottle shop—who collects documents despite being blind—meets a dazzling demise by way of spontaneous combustion, a phenomenon that was believed at the time to be a possible side-effect of drinking excessive amounts of alcohol. Krook's spontaneous combustion was a mystery for which every reader at the time would want an answer.

19 The desire for closure taps into our emotions as though we had a relationship with the characters in the narrative. Delayed gratification and a sustained feeling of suspense and anxiety work together to bring recursion to the forefront; the cliffhanger—dependent on non-linear memory formation and various layers of recursion—appeals to our human desire for closure. Because of the momentum the cliffhanger deploys, audiences are propelled across the gaps in time eager to order their copy of the next installment as soon as it is available. The cliffhanger works by playing on the anxieties of their audience and relying on their insatiable desire for closure.

The Function of the Serial Novel

Before Dickens became a household name, high-society reviewers raked his work (and the act of indulging in novels in general) through the mud. Dickens' reviewers raved: "[T]he form of publication of Mr. Dickens' works must be attended with bad consequences. The reading of a novel is not now the undertaking it once was... The monthly number comes in so winningly, with methodical punctuality, and with so moderate an amount at a time, that novel­ reading becomes a sort of stated occupation, and not to have seen the last part of Martin

Chuzzlewit is about as irregular as not to have balanced your books" (North British Review

85). This quote is telling, exemplifying the idea that exposure to the serial form over time normalizes the ideas it presents. The author's tone is conflicted. He cannot seem to decide if serial novels are corrupting or if he also enjoys reading them. The quote offers a peek at just how widespread the serial novels were, and it also transmits the idea that to avoid participating in this popular pastime was to be out of touch.

Serial novels provided an economically accessible, efficient delivery method for a popular narrative to reach a large group for a profit. On the level of economics, one form of

20 "discourse" is determined by where one chooses to spend their money. Serial novels that were successful were successful only because the people wanted to read them. Audiences vote with their money and with their attention as they do now. Because of the desire to be financially solvent, or even profitable, publishers did not want to run unpopular narratives, so they would listen to audience opinions and cater to their desires. Advertisers bought space in the periodicals to get the word out about their products, and consumers of the written word soon became consumers of advertised goods and services. As today, money speaks.

Humans are susceptible to suggestive memory and can have their values pushed, over time, in one direction or another through exposure to a presence, or lack, of a certain stimulus over time. This is the exact type of recursive suggestion that the serial form taps in to. Kelleter describes this interaction: “...serial narratives contribute to how the people who produce and consume them (sometimes doing both things at the same time!) understand themselves and proceed in these roles” (Kelleter 103). In academic discourse, for example, "scholars need to convince their audience of the meaningfulness of their groupings and their (re)construction of discursive constellations. They have to select and present their data in a way that their peers and readers accept as evidence of a point well made" (Wijsen and Stuckrad 220). Over time, and with enough visibility, almost anything can be introduced incrementally into a discourse. With repetition, it will eventually gain acceptance and weave its way into society's cultural tapestry.

In a similar sense, the serial too must construct itself and present itself to general audiences in such a way that they accept the constructed narratives for reality.

21 Interlude

"How could you !?" I screamed. My journal stuffed under my mattress was still there, but it was not where I had left it. I had been riding on thin ice for a while with my parents. I knew that eventually my lies would catch up with me and so then my folks too would catch up with me. At a certain point, I think I ceased caring. I almost hoped they wouldfind out. The tension made my willpower flimsy; even though I had close friends whose parents had thrown them out onto the streets in response to their coming out, I almost longedfor the blowout that wouldfinally yank me off the fence of not-knowing. Here it was. Here it was, and I was furious that my safe place—the record of my life, the place where my inner thoughts marinated—had been violated. No longer safe, I vowed to keep important things off of the page. Even though my paranoid teenage habit of writing things obliquely in my journal kept from my mom many of the details, she could tell something was going on with me. I was clearly in a relationship with someone older, and I had just as clearly never told either of my parents about it.

"Melanie and the rest of the girls said you weren't out at the ranch with them last night." The accusation wasn't wrong, but I couldn't tell her where I had been. "Where were you? Are you pregnant? Are you on drugs? You were gone all night!" It was a few weeks after the journal incident, and again the questions battered me. I stifled a laugh that was also a gag.

My mom sat on my bedfor hours, just holding my journal and pleadingfor me to speak. "I'm just going to sit here until you speak to me," she said. I tried to call her bluff. For hours it was just she and I on my bed. I cried, and she pleaded. Finally, she won. I got too tired and wanted the pressure to stop. I blurted out, "I'm gay." I sobbed that I had been at a GYA meeting, Gay

Youth Anonymous, in Hillcrest at the Gay and Lesbian Center, and I had lied to her about where

22 I was going. I assured her that I had been with safe and loving people who also happened to be gay.

I don't even remember her words; I just remember that she cried. For three days she stayed in her room. My dad and siblings spoke to me in the interim. I was unsure at the time if my mom had already told my dad or not; looking back now I am certain she did. I never came out directly to my Dad, we just all silently knew that he knew. I eventually came out to my brother, in perhaps the most awkward way possible, and my little sister just kind of grew up knowing. She has always been one of my greatest champions.

I was lucky. I was never thrown out of the house. However, my folks did send me to therapy. I remember their saying that the therapy wasn't for the gayness, but to help me with any confusion I might have. Ultimately, I agreed to go, but I didn't feel like I ever had a choice.

Whatever the reason, the result was the same. I felt that they felt I was broken. But I was among the privileged few. I still had a home when many of my queer youth friends stayed in shelters or on the streets near the Gay and Lesbian Center and the Adams Street area. Three days later, the first time I spoke to my mom was to tell her about how suicidal I had been, including trying twice, because I was forced to hide who I was. It was my coming out as severely depressed that got us talking again—this was something she could understand. It provided us a place, even though precarious and delicate from which to build.

Soon enough, I got a job at a residential camp the summer before I left for college. I spent all summer away in the mountains, avoiding my family and their feelings. In August, I drove up to UC Santa Cruz to begin my freshman year in the dorms. My folks and I never really revisited the subject of my coming out—never directly anyway—our relationship just seemed to improve slowly by increments over time. It took my educating them a few times, a snap at their

23 language; one evening in the car on the way to dinner, when they referred to my girlfriend of five years as "my friend" was particularly effective. Sometimes the volume of my voice seemed to rival the volume of the criticisms proportionately—often about my choice of clothing—hurtling at me from my family, and the rest of the world. Things like a disappointed "Oh, I liked your hair longer," or the dreaded "Is that what you're wearing?" not to mention the "can't you just wear a dress?" chiseled away at my soul and my self-esteem as though I were made of soft material easily eroded or mashed. Being homo in a hetero world is like that Starbucks that is every 20 feet, attacking our eyes with marketing and the semiology of cafe culture reminding you, in case you could forget, that there is, indeed, coffee for sale over here. Every twenty minutes of my life, or more frequently, I am reminded of the double consciousness I live. I cannot hold hands with my partner on the street for fear of threats or violence. Heteronormative culture is pervasive and presented everywhere; it is in all media, tv, film, music, and most advertisements, and that is fine, but every time I see it, I am reminded of what I do not have. I do not have the privilege to love whom I love in the public sphere. I often think of W.E.B. DuBois and others also living double lives of all varieties, and I realize the only way out is the story.

Now, more than twenty years after I officially came out, I know that my mother reading my journal was an attempt to assure herself that I was all right. She was motivated by worry and by love for a child who would not speak to her. I know she did not mean to violate the privacy that I felt kept me safe in my closed-minded hometown. I am sure that, for her, reading this will be painful. But it is a part of my story and a part of who I am. Although these experiences were painful at the time, I would not now want to change these formative experiences. The history matters. It cannot be altered lest the temporal butterfly effect may not have produced my current existence. I would be a different person, my motivations would be different, and I might see the

24 world differently. Despite the difficulties and the unknown, I am fortunate to have been able to tell my story. Getting it out, as it were, was the first step. I know stories need a safe place and know I want to spread this idea into the world. I am sure that if it were not for my mom,

Elizabeth, the ultimate antecedent of my story in more ways than one, I would not be the woman

I am today. For that, I am ever indebted.

25 III. Key Features of an Evolving Form: Origins and Scope of the Modern Serial

The serial form, deployed as a primary means of production for various cultural forms,

has become more or less the standard form of broadcast media over the last 200 years. Though

the modern serial's tradition is rooted in the serial novel, the modern serial is influenced heavily

by its own contemporary contexts—current events, morals of the population, and popular

values—and has evolved to account for these influences. The growing role of premium cable

television in all but the most impoverished residences in our communities, the emergence of the

internet and increasing affordability of home computers, and our cell phones—the perfect

conveyance tool for the modern serial form in a variety of mediums—at our very fingertips all

contribute to creating an environment optimally suited for delivering the serial narrative to its

intended viewers.

Serials like AMC's The Walking Dead (2010-2018), HBO's Game of Thrones, and

Netflix's Ozark and Orange is the New Black are examples of one type of modern-serial, what I

call the long-form dramatic serial. I have chosen to examine this type of modern serial because it

is most akin to serial novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century. Before online streaming

capabilities, HBO, Showtime, and other premium cable channels ran a handful of serial shows

like The Wire, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and The L Word. Watch parties were common

events—groups of people gather to watch new episodes as they air, but for years one problem

remained. If a viewer missed an episode, they either had to rely on their friends to catch them up

(which was never as good), or they had to wait until a rerun came on (which sometimes took

weeks).

Online streaming content and live-television recording services that began to appear in

the early part of the twenty-first century changed this, and, with the shift, the modern serial took

26 its place at the forefront of popular culture primarily within the field of media studies. In the past ten years, the serial form has become an intensely-discussed prominent feature of contemporary popular culture. A decade after the turn of the twenty-first century, online­ streaming content began shifting the economic and technological landscape for new online media delivery methods that fit the task of disseminating new serials better than ever before. Producers and directors alike once avoided the serial, but the advent of online streaming changed that trend.

Online streaming content and television recording devices, like TiVo or OnDemand, enabled viewers to catch up quickly on any and all missed episodes of their favorite serial or reality TV program. The ability to stream content moves beyond merely providing a way for viewers to catch up on their shows; it has also given rise to new ways of thinking about the serial form. An expanding group has embraced the move from television to streaming media. The modern serial has taken this to the most extreme position where the buzz on serial media is monitored for trends and the products—the serials—are adjusted to please audiences' tastes giving audiences

"what they want" or "what's selling" with no regard to possible ill effects on their consumer­ facing products for those very same consumers.

The modern serial is ubiquitous. Unlike the serial novel, the modern serial is realized in many different forms in many different mediums. Serials today are presented on televisions, radio, podcasts, XM radio, game consoles, laptop and desktop computers, online, on video hosting sites like Youtube.com, on social media, or handheld computer devices. Some of these new forms are quite similar to the format of the Victorian serial novel, and some are the result of more modern interpretations and evolutions. The list of possibilities for modern expressions of the serial form is long. Examples include long-form serial dramas, movie franchises spanning worlds, soap operas, radio shows, podcasts, newspaper columns, and twitter fiction, to name a

27 few. Cyclical discourse between author and audience in the modern serial, as in the serial novel, remain integral to the serial form and take on new aspects and ways to interact with and influence their audiences. The modern serial includes the features of the serial form as originally expressed but must also account for post-television era online streaming capabilities, how devices of the serial form (the cliffhanger and the recap) have developed and changed over time, and how the modern serial is tied even more firmly with capitalism.

The Modern Serial and the Evolution of Worldbuilding

The first season of a modern long-form serial focuses on establishing a foundation for the characters' motivations and projected arcs. Worldbuilding frequently does double duty in modern serial forms teaching characters and audiences the rules for existence in the serial's world. As in the serial novel, the beginning of the modern serial is devoted to audiences and characters building fluency within the semiology of the show's discourse and to learning the context in which the show is presented—its “world.” The first season will provide a combination of telling backstory; introducing characters, their motivations, and affinities; conveying the overarching challenges and choices the characters must make. For example, in

AMC's The Walking Dead, the audience “gets to know” the characters and the world they are living in alongside the characters after a zombie virus outbreak. In the first episode of The

Walking Dead (TWD), Rick Grimes, the hero of the series, wakes up out of a coma to a post- apocalyptic world full of zombies. He stumbles home trying to find his wife and child but finds only an empty house. Rick meets Morgan, and his son Duane, who are hiding-out nearby. They teach him about the new world as it exists. "Don't you get bit. Bites kill you. The fever burns you out. but after a while, you come back" (34:25-35). Morgan teaches Rick how to kill the

28 zombie "walkers" by "going for the head." In just a few scenes the characters do the work of establishing a scene for the viewers in a convincing, emotionally heightened way.

The modern long-form dramatic serial is continuous and repetitive to a greater extent than the serial novel. It is repetitive because of a desire for maximum audience exposure, and because of our natural forgetting and remembering rhythms of life. After the first season, there are episodes devoted to individual character development and episodes that function more like character sketches. These types of episodes focus on one or two characters and follow how they interact with and solve problems. Or the episodes focus on supporting characters, creating and sustaining subplots, establishing power structures and hierarchy, and building empathy for characters through the illusion of shared experience and perspective.

The audience wields a fair amount of power over the serial they finally watch. This power is evident in the values represented, recreated, and re-shown in serial form that reinforce societal norms and values. The serial is an excellent way to disseminate and reinforce ideology

—incrementally and under the radar—or it can be used towards bringing a new ideology or way of life to light, gaining supporters in the process. The serial novel functions to bring one ideology to the forefront. In 2019, for example, current serials frequently work toward upholding a heteronormative binary, "family values," capitalism, and patriarchal processes. However, these are not the only messages a serial could promote or hold in a position of value. The serial could encourage teamwork or the idea that divisiveness is unnecessary. It could do the work of transmitting an ideology of equality. The serial captures readers with the promise of more, constantly delaying gratification which makes it particularly commercially useful and particularly adept at conveying ideology and manufacturing a dominant discourse— subtly, and between the lines. A modern example, like the long-form dramatic serial, sustains

29 worldbuilding over many seasons (often many times longer than the nineteen months of

Dickensian serials).

Development of Devices of Continuity in the Modern Serial

The cliffhanger developed alongside the serial form as it moved from print onto the radio airwaves and eventually to various televisual and screen-based mediums. In the modern era, cliffhangers still function to bridge gaps in the narrative and in the time between installments.

However, the features of today's cliffhanger lie at the far end of the spectrum relative to their existence in serial novels—they are more extreme in their characteristics. Tension builds throughout numerous episodes leading up to a big event that triggers the cliffhanger ending. As the drama amplifies and the action heats up, viewers conditioned to know something is coming pay ever closer attention. A choice is made, and the audience is propelled by events leading up to a moment of challenge. Audiences naturally expect this sequence to follow with an outcome, but this when the cliffhanger at this point arrests the action. The cliffhanger disrupts the process of challenge, choice, and outcome. Audiences must wait until the next episode, or—as is increasingly common—they must wait until the next season a year later for closure. Today's cliffhangers are more significant, create more anxiety in their consumers, and occur with more frequency than ever before. Modern audiences have come to expect a season to use cliffhangers with some frequency. Current long-form dramatic serials often feature a combination of a handful of smaller cliffhangers interspersed leading up to one more substantial cliffhanger at the end of the season. The modern long-form dramatic serial's use of the cliffhanger is honed to create anxiety in the viewers and momentum in the narrative which brings new relationships, based in shared experience, off of the screen and into the real world (which I will come to presently).

30 First, an example from the modern long-form dramatic serial: consider the last episode of

season six of The Walking Dead, in which viewers were subjected to an especially heinous

cliffhanger. Rick Grimes' group of survivors is held hostage by a rival group of survivors, the

Saviors, after breaking a deal. The group is captured and surrounded in the dark by the larger,

armed group of Saviors. There is no way out. Negan, leader of the Saviors, has set the price for

their disobedience as the death of one group member. One of Rick's group will meet Lucille—

Negan's chain-wrapped baseball bat—face to face. The whole group of main characters for

whom viewers have grown to care are surrounded in the dark pleading on their knees for mercy

waiting for the inevitable violence. Negan paces around the circle of crying, pleading, kneeling

prisoners reciting a children's rhyme. Around and around he walks until he stops in front of an unknown character. The bat goes up. The camera zooms in on the chains lashed to its shaft, and

with a sickening crack, the screen goes dark.

The viewer is stunned. At the very moment before the reveal of the action, the hopes for

the anticipated resolution are shattered when the credits roll. Feeling desperate to know more—

to find out what happens—but knowing there is nothing to do but wait can be maddening. Fans

know the next episode that airs will complete the arc, and they wait with great anxiety until the

closure they need finally comes, and they learn what happens next. In this case, viewers were

forced to wait a year to find out who had been killed. The wait can become physically

uncomfortable. With the momentum the narrative has gained, the cliffhanger launches the reader

forward into space until we land, a time later, safely within the next installment, the upcoming

season. The feeling dissipates with time, but even a year later viewing audiences are still eager

to follow up with their favorite serial to find out what happened.

31 The cliffhanger has been honed to create anxiety in the audience; it preys more intently on our desire for closure. That anxiety might take the form of prompting us to talk with others in our community in an attempt to assuage it, hoping a friend might have insight into what is coming next. In this sense, the modern serial form is designed to stimulate a shared experience and point of identification across a broad viewer base and geographically disparate discourse community. Cliffhangers cause anxiety, which is essential for maintaining continuity and bridging the gaps, during the time between episodes and seasons, and is at the crux for our desire for closure.

These activities keep events fresh in their minds because of their sheer impact, but the cliffhanger technique can also spur some fans into action outside of the primary text. The desire for narrative closure engendered by the cliffhanger creates a “spreading” serial loop that encourages fans to generate and consume related narratives in disparate mediums. Missing pieces of fragmented stories prompt audiences to fill in the gaps by taking the narrative off the page spawning more interaction between reader and text as readers are invited to fill the gaps within the narrative with their own continuations of the story, or discussion with a fellow reader of the serial. Today there are fan sites, and fan-fiction devoted to many serials. People feel invited to interact with the characters in the space between episodes or between seasons.

Entire communities form around certain serial expressions—for example, the Walker

Stalker Conventions held in cities across the United States to provide a place for fans and stars and writers of the show to come together in appreciation of TWD. Chat rooms and message boards are devoted to fan art created in various mediums and media for almost any contemporary serial productions. Fans of these shows take to online platforms to share predictions, share outrage when characters are killed off, or to rail against the writers and producers when the

32 screenplay and the graphic novel it is based on differ from one another. They browse online shopping outlets and purchase show merchandise, LARP (live action role play) scenes from their favorite episodes, write blogs or fan fiction, make costumes to attend “cons” and “experiences,” or browse recaps and show-related blogs online. And, at each of these points, there are new ways to make money off of their consumer base.

The recap—short for recapitulate meaning to restate the headlines—is a device unique to the modern serial with no discernable counterpart in the serial novel. Recaps usually occur before the first episode following a season-ending cliffhanger. It both reminds the audience of past events and creates space for making new connections. A recap works to rebuild a portion of the tension and anxiety the cliffhanger left viewers within the previous installment. True to its name, a recap generally hits the major relevant plot points of the past season, to provide a sufficient reminder of the circumstances and events of the prior season. Together cliffhangers and recaps bridge the long gaps in time between episodes, or between seasons refreshing the audience's memory while also providing a chance to rewrite, emphasize, reconceptualize, etc.

Recaps became a necessity because of the long gaps between episodes and seasons and short human memory. They also provide a new entry into the story each time, allowing new ideas and current events can be introduced; it is a space in which the producer can highlight or downplay certain events depending on the way they want their audience to react.

A disembodied voice-over is often the narrator of a recap, but Netflix's Ozark does a stylized version of the recap before the first episode of season two. The head of an influential crime-family, Ruth Langmore, tells her incarcerated father the most recent events at home. She relates how Marty Byrde's move to their town to launder money for a cartel disrupted the Snells' heroin business and a covert FBI operation. Ruth tells her father that both of his brothers have

33 been killed and that in retaliation Darlene killed the cartel's man. Ruth tells her father she does not know what will happen next and the screen goes dark. Season two begins when Langmore is released from prison. Though the audience knew of Ruth's father, he first appears onscreen in the recap between seasons. The recap is a threshold that allows entrance and egress. A new character enters the picture and the highlights of the past season come out. Recaps keep the audience up with the pace of the show, and they build in another layer of recursion to the heaping pile. We all forget and remember at different rates, but this disparity can be mitigated by using a recap.

The Function of the Modern Serial

Modern serials are much like the serial novel, motivated towards capitalist ends: profit. These stories are still produced to please audiences in a bid for their attention and hard- earned dollars. Every serial tries to outdo the next when trying to win viewers with favorite themes and storylines. Like the cliffhanger, the function of the narratives produced in serial form have evolved and intensified over time. During Dickens' era, the links between the serial form

(at this time the serial novel) were far more superficial than today. During the years between the serial novels of the Victorian era and the modern serial form of 2019, the ties between capitalism and the serial have grown stronger. They are linked through dependence on money for advertising; sales of merchandise and cable packages; by the appearance of reboots and spin­ offs; and by championing and upholding the heteronormative binary. The serial form performs work for capitalism that scholars and media producers alike are still discovering.

New ideas about how to put the serial to work are helping to further hone the effectiveness of the serial as a way of seamlessly convincing people to adopt, or at least to consider certain ideas. The serial can be used to pull ideas incrementally in one direction or

34 another (politically or morally), and when harnessed by infinitely funded multinational corporations, they become a driving force for capitalism. This assault can pull the trajectory of meaning-making and culture in one direction or another or even to alter what the masses accept for “normal” or “good.” After The Walking Dead came out in 2010, zombie-themed shows popped up on television and streaming media outlets, movie theaters played zombie films, and zombie Halloween costumes were flying off the shelves. It seemed as though, all of a sudden, zombies were everywhere. In 2012 and 2013, students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks participated in week-long games in which groups of students wore armbands to designate them as zombies or zombie hunters. Students ran around campus shooting each other with Nerf guns and pretending to bite each other. The game would inevitably spill into the classroom to talk about the events of the television serial and the graphic novel. As television producers and filmmakers realized the zombie angle was profitable, more zombie television shows and movies poured into popular culture. Before TWD, zombie media was not uncommon, but it was far from typical. A zombie flick might be released by a B-studio every few years, but it was more of a niche genre. After TWD first aired in 2010, numerous other zombie-related screen based serial narratives began to appear. There were such television shows as Fear the Walking Dead, a prequel to TWD featuring some of the first season cast members; the CW's iZombie; Netflix's

Santa Clarita Diet; the SYFY channel's Z Nation; and films like World War Z, and World War Z

II (coming 2019). By sheer volume and representation, the zombie-media craze gained credibility as a profitable genre and an excellent backdrop for upholding dominant social values. The zombie genre champions values that have earned even more credence in today's society: the toxic masculinity championed in this genre has helped change the landscape of our dominant discourse and collective morality.

35 Individuals can earn credibility despite the story they have to tell. Some characters have a story that goes against dominant discourse in society. Like the homosexual characters in The

Walking Dead, for example. The sexualities of the characters in TWD are not hidden. There are straight characters, heteronormative couples—even some that have children. There are gay and lesbian characters, who have girlfriends or boyfriends, and who work and fight alongside the rest of the survivors. Even though sexualities are known, they are made so little of, it is refreshing.

When sexuality is discussed their value as a human, a survivor, and a friend outweighs any prejudices other characters have towards them. Writing the homosexual characters in this way works towards normalizing LGBTQIA+ people's presence in and contributions to society.

This portrayal models accepting behavior for viewers when encountering a similar situation, and it also subversively works on the prejudice in the first place offering up one possibility for one person's existence. The more representations of homosexual characters, or any "other" characters for that matter, there are interacting in society, out and proud as themselves, the better for telling the real stories of our citizens. Often though, the serial form is deployed in agreement with dominant values such as the heteronormative binary, the "American dream," and consumer culture. It takes a discerning eye to see the values beneath the narratives foregrounded—the real messages carried at the heart of the serial.

Think of the satire lurking in Bleak House, messages championing of a system of law and order roiling under the surface of Netflix's Ozark, the heteronormative binary and toxic masculinities depicted in The Walking Dead that feed bro-culture and re-present traditional values in a sustained manner over time. Yes, the representation homosexual characters in TWD provide is needed, but the sexual identities of the show's characters are not the focus of the values of the show. The Walking Dead is an example of a modern, long-form dramatic serial that

36 perpetuates an “us versus them” mentality, the idea that might is right, and the attitude that men

are inherently better leaders are all messages at its core. In this case, unlike in the serial novel,

Bleak House, the serial is working with the alienating effects of capitalism and its late-stage

death rattle.

Just as boosting readership preoccupied serial novel publishers' thoughts, modern serial

producing entities are even more keen to boost viewership. The larger the viewership, the more

profit a serial can earn. Companies that buy time to run their commercials during commercial

breaks pay more for screen time during hit shows. However, advertising during commercial breaks is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is also product placement, like, for

example, in episode six, season five of Orange is the New Black, “Flaming Hot Cheetos.” In this

episode, the governor's office sends boxes of Hot Cheetos, Takis, and tampons to the women in

the prison. The snacks make several appearances throughout the show.

In one scene, when Black Cindy checks Anita's hands for Cheeto dust, the viewer feels as

though she can almost taste the cheesy powder as if they had dipped their hands in the bag

themselves. It is difficult to combat the sheer number of times individuals are inundated with

advertisements for snack and junk foods. The effect of watching a character who has grown in

esteem eating a certain thing, or using a certain product is an effective advertising strategy

providing credibility to the advertised audiences through the media they are already

consuming. It is much easier to sell something to someone when they are unaware that you are

selling them anything. Serials work sneakily and subversively towards perpetuating the

dominant narrative, which, today, is “they with the most money makes the rules.” But the

modern serial could work just as hard towards another end, if it were applied in that way. The

serial form is a powerful tool that can be used to reinforce whatever ends one is working

37 towards. It is a tool, a mechanism towards multipurpose ends. In this way, it twins the function of rhetoric. If stories teach us how to make choices, then the serial form transmits ideology itself.

38 Interlude

D-. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the paper again; I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was not mistaken; there was a big red D- scrawled across my essay. Underneath that a single word: pseudo-intellectual. I looked down at the dingy graffitied desk acutely aware of a growing heat building inside. My ears burned and my eyes began to tear up. Ifelt like I had been punched in the gut. I had worked hard on that paper. I couldn't fathom what I was seeing.

I don't remember the rest of the class that day, but I remember the feelings of embarrassment, confusion, and anger. Pseudo-intellectual? Where were the rest of the comments? Had she made any suggestions for improvement? No. Nothing else. I just sat there, reeling.

From the sheltered valley of my hometown, I imagined going away to college would allow me the freedom to be myself. I was sure that life outside of Lakeside would be better. My first year in college at the University of California Santa Cruz, I stillfelt unfulfilled. After a year at UCSC, I decided to live abroadfor a while before moving to the East Coast for school and to join my ex-girlfriend who, at the time, was in a Ph.D. program in English at Johns Hopkins in

Baltimore, Maryland. While I waited to establish residency to transfer to the University of

Maryland, College Park (UMCP), I worked and took classes at a local community college in

Catonsville, in Baltimore County. To fulfill a prerequisite for admission to UMCP I took a writing class. I have always loved to write, so, despite passing both AP English exams in high school, I registeredfor an introductory writing class.

The assignment in question was an analysis of a song. I chose to analyze Melissa

Etheridge's song "I Want to Come Over," and in the essay, I described the agency the rhetor displays in her action disregarding the consequences of a forbidden love she must pursue. Ifelt a connection to the song and tried, including workshopping the draft at the campus' writing

39 center and with my partner, to write what I thought was an interesting analysis that would stand out from the crowd. And it did. But not in the way I had hoped.

After receiving the grade on my paper, I requested to meet with the instructor. I remember her being very brusque with me when I arrived telling me she suspected me of plagiarism because she did not believe that I inherently understood what the term female agency, a focus of the paper I had just written, meant. She seemed like she didn't want to talk about the grade, but I pressed the issue. I have never been a "grade monger," but it bothered me that there would be no constructive criticism and instead only a hurtful, scarring accusation. So, I stayed andforced the issue by sharing with her some stories about my life. I explained to her my life situation: including my academic influences, and why I looked like "a little punk." Eventually, she agreed to regrade the essay, and I came out of the class with an A-. Ever since this incident,

I have wondered about the effect of my telling my story to her. I told her about my AP classes, about my girlfriend who was a lit student at Johns Hopkins, and about my intentions with the paper, and explaining some of the ideas I wrote about in the paper and just generally tried to get to help her see my background. Even though there was still a fair amount offriction between me and her, once she knew a bit more about me and we established a baseline for our extended conversation, the semester finished without incident.

40 IV. Seriality in the Introductory Writing Classroom

In our age of reality television, “fake” news, political punditry, insidious ad campaigns launched by massive corporations stare judgingly down from their billboards on high. Amidst the Amazon culture, the glitz and glam, flashing lights and the sheer, changing deluge of commerce—the waning and waxing tide of profit, it is difficult to hear one's heartbeat with all of the intruding decibels. We are too busy to look up from our screens and our serials to take part in real life that is happening NOW off-screen in the real world. One group is scared of the next group, and that group of another group and so on. We deport immigrants and debate whether or not to fund a giant wall along our southern border. We are divided and divided again by our chosen affiliations. I see the experience of my childhood—the experience of being misunderstood, being discounted, and being judged—replicated in large-scale everywhere in

2019. Our system marginalizes many groups: people of color, the LGBTQIA community, women, immigrants, fat people, and non-Christians are among them. All of these factors affect the way we see ourselves and the way we perceive events, people, places, life around us through these filters. The hunt for the many stories comprising our whole is integral to our attempt to discern a beacon through the fog obscuring our vision. But new perspectives can provide enough relief so that the boundaries of dominant societal mores are made visible allowing us to examine why they are mores in the first place.

Now, as a writing instructor—a fat, white, lesbian who presents now more like a hockey mom than a boi-child—I have the opportunity to work towards privileging unheard voices and sidelined stories to the forefront. The classroom and our interactions as a classroom community can be shaped to provide students a platform to tell their story and to make an impact on those

41 around them. By using the cyclical communication aspect of the serial form, the writing classroom can achieve the project of bringing sidelined voices to the forefront.

Creating Space for New Voices through Worldbuilding

The beginning of a class, like the beginning of any serial narrative, should provide a sturdy foundation as a strong context for the story to come--or, in the case of a writing course, for the semester ahead. I do not mean to imply when I talk about worldbuilding, that the writing course itself will run just like a serial. What I propose is not a classroom version of Bleak

House, or The Walking Dead—despite having zombies in classroom somedays (though that usually has to do with my students' lack of sleep). Layered serial elements work collectively to hold expressions of the serial form together over a period of years, and they can be just as effective towards building cyclical communication in a classroom community throughout a fifteen-week semester. Much like getting to know someone new, entering into a new discourse community, or familiarizing yourself with a new serial, a classroom community develops over time as we are introduced to our course's world a little bit at a time. Seriality's shifting, relative nature makes it particularly malleable and transferable into the classroom as a serial-based pedagogy. The relative nature of seriality reinforces the need for a contextualized approach that takes into account the perspectives of narrators and audiences alongside the socio-historical situation from which each student's story emerges. This chapter will focus on the ways to foster a similar cycle of communication method to the serial novel and the modern serial in the classroom. This chapter will suggest some approaches an instructor might take towards incorporating a serial cycle of communication in a classroom community towards bringing sidelined voices to the forefront: worldbuilding to build a classroom community, by sharing

42 writing with our classmates in a recursive write-share-communicate-and-write-again loop, and by using key devices like the cliffhanger and the recap.

Worldbuilding, or setting a context for our time together, is an essential first step in building a cyclical communication between the author (individual), the text (the individual's writing), and the audience (the individual class members and instructor). Setting a strong context is important because every student that enters a classroom brings with her vast and unique life experiences. Students have different home lives, have learned different lessons, they have different personalities likes and dislikes; they have individual dreams and aspirations, they have been formed by people they have known, have witnessed countless events, both mundane and impactful, from their own perspectives. We all come from somewhere, we believe in some thing, and we carry that somewhere with us in our every thought and action, and sometimes in our outward expression to the world. Everyone has an origin story: “The narratives students bring to the classroom should be an important part of the class curriculum” (Boyd 112). We world build because it teaches us to interact with our new shared world, gives us overarching values to pay attention to for the duration of the course and to acquaint ourselves with our cohort of individual classmates. By establishing a shared world, we open up possibilities together and start together on the same plane.

In the case of a modern serial, the characters either already know how to interact with their world or they must learn how to do so at the beginning of their run—as with the character

Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead. Just as Rick learns how to navigate his new world from another character, and the audience learns about the world of the serial along with him, a classroom group also must world build to establish their shared context. Because a traditional style of education is so pervasive, it is essential to develop a strong context to offer a concrete

43 foundation to which students who struggle with new ways of learning can cleave. Students are often unsure how to react when a system with which they are familiar is interrupted. Freire describes the traditional banking-style classroom to which I am referring, and its traditional- ethos values. As a counter to this, engaging in the praxis of seriality is intended to interrupt this traditional education cycle. It aims to offer a new classroom space outside of the "traditional" space—a queer space—where diverse and representative voices can find a platform and begin to build a community. This interruption "breaks, divides, hitches, disruptions, disturbances, ruptures, or breeches—counters to traditional ways of behaving or conversing—to change the status quo of dominant values and practices” (Ryan 23). There will always be “resisting,” students, the ones who do not want to learn a new pedagogical process, and who do not want to be in a classroom that differs in any way from the norm (hooks 9), and to mitigate these students' upset, the worldbuilding process is crucial for helping them suspend judgment and come along on our journey.

The plans we discuss during the first couple weeks of class as we world build, gives us a glimpse into our future grounding us where we are, and where we will go should provide some comfort for students feeling unearthed by new pedagogy. On the first day in the writing classroom, I like to begin by reading a short story or watching a short video, or discussion of shared knowledge. The values of the text chosen should be the ones we return to again and again over the semester. These values offer another way an overarching narrative can guide the ideas that we return to repeatedly over the semester. They act akin to an overarching storyline of sorts to which we always return. Students begin building a shared semiology from the beginning of our time together, and we keep adding to it during our experience together over time.

44 “The Story of the Arrowmaker” by M. Scott Momaday is a short tale that describes an arrowmaker and his wife sitting making arrows in their tent. In the story, the arrowmaker can tell there is someone standing outside the tent, and he and his wife carry on their business to avoid alarming the possible intruder. The arrowmaker speaks in Kiowa, "I know that you are there on the outside, for I can feel your eyes upon me. If you are a Kiowa, you will understand what I am saying, and you will speak your name.” The person outside the tent does not speak, and the arrowmaker shoots an arrow through the tent killing the person on the outside. This short story tells the value of using your voice to tell your story. If you do not, you may have others' narratives imposed upon you which can be detrimental to your wellbeing. The arrowmaker assumes the person on the outside is an enemy because of the lack of speech and thus imposes his narrative onto the person outside. Perhaps there was another reason the person outside did not speak but the arrowmaker, his wife, and we will never know. Over the semester we return to the values of the arrowmaker's story: the values of honing your craft, so it suits your purpose, and speaking your story. These two concepts become overarching themes that unite the courses standalone, separate class meetings. They become our shared values, goals to achieve, and they can be fortified over time by extending the story outward breathing life into it again and again.

One way I suggest starting to build a community is by doing a name-game icebreaker at the beginning of the first day. It serves two purposes. The primary objective is learning everyone's names quickly. This is important to me because in so many of my classes I knew no one. The second purpose is for breaking the ice in a silly way because a shared fun group experience releases endorphin which promotes social bonding. Learning names in a fun way is a simple first step towards building a classroom community and growing cyclical communication

45 within the community and its practices. Though I am often met with groans, and some rolling eyeballs, name games are often the first thing we do together as a classroom community in entering our mutual space. I am simultaneously terrible at learning names, and hyper-aware that my quickly learning a student's name builds their confidence in their instructors. I work to fit in a short name-learning activity or ice-breaker during the first couple of class meetings during each semester.

My favorite icebreaker lately, for the Writing Across Context introductory writing courses I teach at University of Alaska Fairbanks, and its affiliated Community and Technical

College, begins: “we are all going ice fishing and we will all pitch in to bring everything we need." I tell the class to come up with something they will bring that begins with the first letter of their first name. I start "I'm Casie, and I'm bringing cheese sandwiches." We go around the room, and each student adds something and repeats what the previous classmates were going to bring as well. A few students down the line might go: “We're all going ice fishing. I'm Nellie, and I'm bringing the nets, he is Arjun, and he is bringing the apples, she is Hannah, and she is bringing hot chocolate, and she is Casie, and she's bringing cheese sandwiches." This activity also gives students a chance for students to model their preferred pronouns for the class and ensure (with my backup) students use them. It continues until every student is bringing something on our trip. The last student has to remember what everyone else's name is and what they are bringing but to take the pressure off of them, I always go again, after all of the students, to bear the brunt of the task on myself. The results that come from taking the time to do this type of group bonding immediately cannot be replicated, and we refer back to this experience often as a class over the semester. This type of bonding unifies a group in a similar way as an inside joke.

46 Starting off a bit silly helps break down barriers and lets everyone get to know one

another. A bit of shared silliness within a group supports people feeling comfortable with one

another and builds the potential for emotional accessibility and real communication. This

practice of getting to know one another even if it feels silly, uncomfortable, or even forced,

influences the class' attitude going forward and is an important step towards forming a

communal space. We discuss methods for encouraging all of our diverse voices to be heard.

During these first few classes, we also work together to lay out rules under which we will all

operate for the duration of our time together. Imagining the boundaries of our classroom is an

act of fantasy, but it is also an act of a radical feminist pedagogy designed to give everyone an

agentive voice. This is our origin story as a classroom community, and it should be as complete

as possible.

Audiences, Community, and the Recursive Writing Practice

The most literal expression of the serial form we use in the writing classroom, as I

conceive of it, is the way we practice writing itself. Our practices are recursive; our weekly

writing unfolds in a part-whole segmented fashion. We write for a specific audience and

repeating this cycle over time allow “other voices” to be heard and represented in these

narratives. Sharing our writing as described works towards creating a cyclical communication

between the author, the text, and the audience. The serial form is a powerful feature of the serial

form that I want to harness for use in the classroom. By sharing our writing, participating in peer

review, and revisiting our writing considering audience feedback we are participating in a

cyclical process, rather than one more linear and traditional. "Creating the curriculum as a

conversation means the students' stories and sense-making are the basis of the class, but these

experiences are situated within a questioning of, reflecting on, and challenging of other

47 perspectives—connecting the story of self and story of us, ultimately moving toward a story of now that can be filled with hope and choice” (Boyd 112). Writing online for a shared community is an experience altogether different than writing for an individual instructor alone. The goals are to activate a cycle of communication through a cyclical writing process that encourages writing in a clear, understandable way and supports bringing narratives outside of dominant discourse inside to the forefront.

Our repetitive process—sharing our writing, receiving feedback from various sources, and returning to the same document to re-write and re-envision—is a practice inherently serial. This practice of writing, reading, and sharing is repeated again and again. It is recursive; it is serial, it becomes a habit, it is where we are coming from as unique individuals. There is a one-to-one relationship of cyclical communication between the serial novel

(author/text/audience), the modern serial (producer/text/audience), and my conception of a writing across contexts classroom (author/text/audience). In each example above, there is a generating body, the body of their work itself, and the audience of the work whose reaction, in turn, influences the generating body once again in further work produced. Each of the three seemingly disparate entities described above exhibits a cyclical communication a uniquely feature of the serial form. In the serial classroom, students are encouraged to take an active role as agentive critics and creators in conversations with others recursively occupying the same relative space.

Much of the “place” this happens within is not a place at all. Aside from using less paper, online-based submissions allow each student access to our lessons and collection of writing at all times through the devices in our pockets, or on the machines in numerous computer labs across campus. I agree with Stacey Waite, that “if we are able to shift what is possible in

48 form—something shifts in the content as well. That connection is inevitable” (86). During class on day one, I make sure everyone can access the class' shared Google drive. All of the students create their own documents in our shared Weekly Writing folder titling them with their names.

Rather than having them hand in hard-copy drafts of their writing in class, students compose weekly assignments in one long, shared, online document throughout the semester. This writing and sharing cycle—author, work, and audience—mimics the same relationship between the

serial novel, its author, and its audience: "Thus, while consumers, producers, media scholars, and

so on operate as agents of narrative continuation, serial narratives, in turn, operate as agents of role differentiation: they produce “producers” just as they make fans or encourage people to act as critics or scholars” (Kelleter 103). The recursive practice of writing and sharing and revising in these ways pushes our known forms for writing and composition and opens up new possibilities in form and content. As students begin to create their own serial with their shared weekly writings, the rest of the classroom community is their audience, their sounding board, and their source for the possible. This can take some time—and though for some students this is not necessary, I want all students to start with the same knowledge and from the same understanding of expectations—but taking a bit of time to situate every student at the beginning is worth the effort.

I explain to them that the course will repeat in two-week cycles. The cyclical communication is most evident in these two-week cycles because one week we write and the next we write again, but we interact with each other's writings as sources for our analyses. For each two-week cycle, the first week focuses on a personal writing prompt on a certain theme, and during the second week, we use the writing produced during the first week as source material for that week's explorations. It includes a writing practice that begins by writing about one's

49 locations, their roots, and events that have led them up to now. It is temporal; it is historical and hopeful. As such, I value beginning with Marshall Ganz's "a story of self" and "a story of us,”—

I reserve “a story of now” for a week of reflection at the end of the semester—is a place to begin that invites the audience to connect with the producer of a “text.”

The story of self begins by presenting a specific challenge the teller has faced, the choice they made about how to deal with that challenge, and the outcome they experienced: “A story of self is a personal story telling ‘why you were called to what you have been called to'” (Ganz 2).

In the context of a writing class students are invited to tell their story, their journey with (or against) writing. It is a hopeful story that encourages the tellers to imagine the future they want for themselves.

A story of us is a collective story that illustrates the “shared purposes, goals, vision”

(Ganz 2) of a community or organization. As with a story of self, a story of us focuses on a challenge, a choice, and an outcome. The story of us, says Ganz, invites other people to be part of your community (2). In the writing classroom I describe, the story of us is their second assignment. It is a synthesis of every class member's "Story of Self." Asking students to write our story of us, the class of individuals offers us what essentially becomes a snapshot—the camera's aperture squints to highlight the diversity of the class's compositions as well as their sameness—of the start of our shared classroom experience.

A story of now is about the challenge our community faces now. It is about the choices it must make and the hope to which group members can aspire. “A ‘story of now' is urgent, it is rooted in the values you celebrated in your story of self and us, and a contradiction to those values that requires action” (Ganz 2). Delaying the process of “a story of now,” in my course's cycle, allows ample time for students in the classroom to build a strong ethos among their peers

50 before asking them to join forces in action. It acts as a capstone on the recursive cycle, provides an endpoint for our serial classroom experience, and widens the scope of the stories each student is encouraged to tell.

I begin this assignment by introducing myself to the class and opening up a discussion about what I've included in my introduction. I introduce myself with my full name, I tell them the credentials I have that allow me to teach their class, and I generally mention a couple of things about my dogs and recreational activities like gardening and skiing. I tell them how I came to Alaska and how I decided to go back to school for my master's degree in English. After my introduction, I ask them for feedback on it. Feedback usually goes something like this: “it was professional,” or maybe my question is met with silence. I prod them, and they respond: it was formal, it wasn't too in depth, and it wasn't too personal. I didn't share information that might be construed as information too personal for my audience (i.e., sexual orientation, which political party I support, or how I feel about gun control). I ask them to think more about my introduction and the work it is doing. We talk about how I decided to share the pieces of information I did discussing context, and "where I am coming from." I ask them to think about how I tailored what I wanted to say about myself in a short speech to my students—watching the lightbulb moments of students realizing that they can control their own narrative in a unique way when they write. All of these practices set the stage to build a classroom community and ethos through location, which I will explain here shortly.

The "Story of Self" assignment encourages students to begin by writing about something they know well. Themselves. As a bonus, this assignment also circumvents the "I don't have anything to write about" complaint. They tell their stories themselves, on their own terms, making deliberate choices considering what to mention and what to overlook. I use Marshall

51 Ganz's “story of self” because it fills the need for establishing a context, a location, from which we are each speaking. The story of self extends into our world-building activities, and through it we can also add to what we know about the people populating our classroom community and contributing to our collective experience of it.

As the student-author writes more and their document begins to fill-out, so, too, does our understanding of their perspective, as we become consumers of their serial. Serial practices, like those described here, bring out the many stories of our population. It parallels queer theory in that it “does not believe in an inherent or essential self; rather, it embraces the self as a shifting and contradictory formation, one that cannot be reduced to ‘good' or ‘bad,' one that is not one at all, but many" (Waite 72). The many experiences represented in any classroom of students are an inadequate sample size for a true cross-section of society. But they are an excellent place to

start towards building the idea that the many stories as a whole are more insightful, valuable, and more vibrant than any one dominant narrative could ever be.

People still act on cultural beliefs that men are better speakers, that character derives from social standing, and that humans are born into particular characters from which they cannot escape. These ways of understanding ethos layer outmoded modernist notions of the isolated

subject onto a vile, ancient concept (Ryan 5). When a queer woman like myself, for example, is discounted not because of what she says but because she is a woman, she understands that it is more complicated than Aristotle's idea that ethos should come from the words of the

speaker. Existence in the margins is touch and go. Those of us who live in the margins— the marginal, the marginalized—we all know where we stand. We stand in between what society dictates and what the self dictates. The world doesn't always want to hear our stories, but it does

52 not erase their existence. Representation, a voice for someone who is struggling, for someone who feels alone, for someone who feels oppressed can be a light in the dark.

Herein lies the difficulty for women (and other marginalized groups) whose ethos, as

"valued by your culture or group, is not recognized as worthy of public participation”

(Ryan7). Much of traditional scholarship on the concept of ethos centers around Aristotelian ethos wherein a rhetor's constructed credibility is comprised by “his intelligence, goodwill, and good character as a persuasive aid in the courts, at ceremonial venues, or in the polis. This classical concept of ethos was created in a homogenous community among male orators in positions of power, whether in the context of law, politics, or public events” (Ryan 5). It is a concept that continues to hinder members of marginalized groups abilities, to speak and be heard. And, so, for this exploration, I will rely on newer definitions of ethos and ethe (pl. ethos).

More recently, however, scholarship has taken up the idea of ethos as “abode” or “dwelling places [that] define the grounds, the abodes or habits, where a person's ethics and moral character take form and develop” (Ryan xiii). I agree with Ryan, the development of character is

“a negotiated, communal act rather than an essentialized reputation, “voice,” or inborn trait”

(Ryan 6). Karlyn Kohrs Campbell explains, ethos “does not refer to your peculiarities as an individual but to the ways in which you reflect the characteristics and qualities that are valued by your culture or group (quoted in LeFevre 45).

The cumulative, cyclically influenced product each student produces over the course of the semester in Google Docs, their digital portfolio, creates a bridge linking each of the semester's class meetings, ideas, and activities—cliffhanger and a recap devices function to ease the disjointed nature of the serial form—and relieves the disjointed feeling accompanying a classroom experience. The serial cycle includes the author of the serial, the text produced, how

53 audience and the produced text interact, and how the audience and the author interact to create something new that neither could have produced without the other. The simple act of encouraging a students' consideration of their audience by following a method of writing and sharing our writing, gives students a chance to practice building relational, extrinsic ethos with the audience. Students quickly cut their teeth in an agile discursive voice that accounts for these new considerations, allowing them to maneuver with the classroom community as individuals creating new ethe, through writing their own narratives, from their point of view—their location—serially.

Devices of Continuity in the Serial Writing Classroom

The cliffhanger and the recap, devices used in many iterations of the serial form, keep students engaged not only with the course but also with each other's stories. These devices have the potential to keep the course feeling alive. Inviting the audience—the classroom full of us— to bring our relationships out of the word on the page into real life conversations and relationships. There are natural gaps between class meetings, and, over mid-semester holiday breaks, these gaps can seem chasmous. It can be difficult to bridge these gaps in time while maintaining student interest in the course material. But, for the serial writing class, I propose that there are techniques we can use to mitigate and engage this discontinuity, to harness the serial form's power for our own purposes. A cliffhanger in the classroom can look many different ways. The following is one of those ways.

At the end of an engaging noticing lesson I do with my Writing 111 students involving a sack full of tangerines and our skills of observation, I tell the students to compose a poetic line about their tangerine. The line can be long or short, specific to their tangerine or universal to all tangerines. I tell them we will do something with them during our next class and collect the lines

54 as their ticket-out-the-door. When the day of the next class arrives, we use each of the lines to compose our collective (and anonymous) poem, our “Ode to a Tangerine.” We take turns drawing lines out of a hat and writing them on the whiteboard one at a time in a column until we have run through all of the slips submitted. Our poem stares back at us. The lines composed by the students about these small citrus fruits can be surprising, compelling—a testament to a unique perspective and individuality. Past students have shown their appreciation for this activity by snapping a picture of the poem with their phone—high praise in our Insta-era. The cliffhanger can be something small like this, or even something more complicated or even something inherently-anxious making for students.

There is one practice I believe in that does cause anxiety in a number of my students. This seemed like an unfortunate side-effect, not something I intend to inflict—at first.

Now, the students' anxiety serves a much broader purpose, as I will explain. I do not assign grades until a week or two after the midpoint in the semester. Though this does not seem at first to fit the definition of the cliffhanger, in this case, the cliffhanger relies on the student's desire for a performative—you have an "A"—moment they have been habituated to for which they are desperate. I try to start the conversation in class that crafting what you want to say, planning out what you put to paper, is a process that you work on improving over time. Learning the skills is what is most important; a grade is not necessarily a good indicator of whether or not a student has learned anything in a particular course. I assure them they will receive grades down the line, but not at first when we are learning and practicing our skills. Despite trying to assuage their grade-worries by my assurances to them that if they were in danger of not passing, I would have already spoken with them well before the midterm, there are always a few who are still mostly full of dread. I do make sure students are working along as they should be, and to assure this I

55 give them full-, partial-, or no-credit for turning in assignments. These assignments are linked to comprise twenty percent of their final grade, and they are still always already anticipating that marker, that letter grade. When I do give them letter grades, I have had ample opportunity to witness their process and engagement with the material, and I can factor this into their final grade. It allows me to account for their learning process and their gradual acquisition of knowledge over time and with practice. It makes that part much more comfortable because I have worked more closely with each student over time in their living document and face-to-face in class. Refraining from assigning letter grades acts as a cliffhanger in much the same way a serial novel would work in that it is adept at capitalizing on anxieties a population already feels.

Another serial device that can be used effectively towards bringing sidelined voices to the front in the writing classroom is the recap. The term “recap” comes from “recapitulate”—to retell the headlines—and is used to represent highlights of events that have happened in previous episodes or installments. Sometimes the recap provides a place in which the producer of a text can spotlight or downplay certain circumstances depending on the way they want their audience to react; it can be merely an update of what happened last week, but it can also be a liminal space where an author may focus on events further in the past, or even give a taste of how a new idea can tie into old events or ideas. Recaps, like the cliffhanger, can play out in our classroom in numerous different ways. A recap only takes at most a couple of minutes, and it is also a way instructors can transition into new or related subjects as the semester moves forward.

One way incorporating a recap could happen is by offering something like a weekly digest on the class' homepage of writing from the week prior in class. The instructor can highlight excerpts of students' writing, make connections between the students' pieces and similar themes students are grappling with, and notice the connections they are

56 making. Recapitulating provides a liminal space allowing current events to come in as a commentary on the topics and themes we are exploring during the semester. It is a space of suspended animation between structured moments of beginnings and endings that allows us space to bring in tangentially related everyday things related in specific ways to what we are doing, being, and learning in the classroom. This type of recap process allows the instructor to link themes students touch on in their writing with current events and other events that impact their real lives. The cliffhanger and recap devices, borrowed from the serial form, allow for connections between what is happening in class and what is happening in the real world to merge. Each of these suggestions is small but useful practices that help to build community and to create a space for continuing connections and outside voices with a narrative as we move forward to reencounter it again in new ways down the line.

57 Finale

“Aren't we are all on our own journeys of self-discovery?” I asked my students in class as we finished up our “Story of Self” assignments. We were working together to recap our

“Story of Self” assignments that we had written the week before. The class agreed that every story represented discussed feeling motivated by factors and individuals outside of ourselves that push us to want the best for ourselves and the people we care about. We discussed doubts about being good enough, that many students expressed struggling within their stories. We talked about points of identification, about our similarities, and our differences. Though reticent at first, sharing their writing has been a challenge for this semester's students. The collective group has softened over time, and our conversations have turned toward searching out points of identification.

The class meetings after writing and sharing our “Story of Us” always take on a feeling distinctly different than the first classes. The self-doubt I saw on many faces on day one has largely dissipated, and in its place, unprompted inter-student conversations increase. In many cases, students develop relationships outside of class based on shared interests and needs. There seems to be a general ease that settles in once we all have a better understanding of where everyone is coming from, no matter who they are. Witnessing this change has heretofore been striking; the change in the students' behavior between the first class where they mostly do not interact with one another to working and communicating together as acquaintances, or even as early-stage friendships blossom, is noticeable.

Today, in class, we discussed the scope of experiences our "Story of Us" assignments represent. I asked the students what they notice. After a lively conversation talking about identification and shared experience, we came to the conclusion that every "Story of Us" in our

58 class, despite the differences in our details we all write about moving towards an essential journey of self-discovery. A particular flavor of self-discovery, though, one of learning to eschew and challenge the narrative others would put upon us.

Self-discovery; this idea brings me back to my own story, and the process through which

I have written this extended investigation, this thesis. Watching my student's journeys, intertwined with my own, our own beautifully flawed weaving together of the academic and the personal helps in unexpected ways to illuminate how my own story intersects and intertwines with and through my thesis. Because it must, because it matters, because it is vital that more classrooms do a better job of making space, recursively, for all students' stories. We must come together in favor of that which overlaps, intersects, and links us while eschewing divisive rhetoric, fearmongering, and a narrow dominant discourse; the future, is us.

59 Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. "Borderlands/La Frontera." Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., edited by

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2016, pp. 1017-1030.

Butts, Dennis. “Critical Reception,” Bleak House by Charles Dickens Palgrave Master Guides.

Macmillan International Higher Education, 1986.

Boyd, Patricia. “Communication as Social Action: Critical Expressivist Pedagogies in the

Writing Classroom.” Critical Expressivism: Theory and Practice in the Composition

Classroom. Eds. Tara Roeder and Roseanne Gatto. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC

Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, November 28, 2014, pp. 107-121.

https://innovationtest2.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/expressivism/. Accessed 15

October 2018.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. Penguin, New York. 2003.

Ganz, M. “What is public narrative?” New England Grass-roots Environmental Fund Website.

2008. http://wearesole.com/What_is_Public_ Narrative.pdf. Accessed 13 November

2016.

Gravil, Richard. Reading “Bleak House.” Humanities-Ebooks, 2012. EBSCOhost,

login.proxy.library.uaf.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true

&db=nlebk&AN=575686&site=eds-live. Accessed 17 December 2018. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, New York. 1994.

Kelleter, Frank. “From Recursive Progression to Systemic Self-observation: Elements of a Theory of

Seriality.” The Velvet Light Trap, No. 79, Spring, 2017. Pp. 99-105. Accessed 29 December

2017.

60 The North British Review. Printed by T. Constable. Vol. 3, W.P. Kennedy, Edinburgh. May-

August,

1845. https://books.google.com/books?id=uvcEAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&sour

ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 2 March 2018.

Ryan, Kathleen J., Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones, eds. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist

Ecological Approach to Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2016.

Kirkman, Robert, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, creators. The Walking Dead. Adapted by

Frank Darabont. AMC Studios, 2010-2019.

Momaday, N. Scott. “The Story of the Arrowmaker,” 4 May 1962, p.B2. von Glaserfeld, Ernst. “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism” The Invented Reality. Ed.

by P. Watzlawick. New York, Norton. 1984. 17-40. English translation of: Glaserfeld, E.

“Einführung in den Radikalen Konstruktivismus. In: Watzlawick, P. (ed.) Die Erfundene

Wirklichkeit, Munich, Piper. 16-38 http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/EvG

Accessed on 8 October 2018.

Waite, Stacey. “The Unavailable Means of Persuasion: A Queer Ethos for Feminist Writers and

Teachers.” Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric.

Wijsen, Frans and Kocku Von Stuckrad. Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study

of Religion. Brill, 2016.

61