After the Break: Serial Narratives and Fannish Reading
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After the Break: Serial Narratives and Fannish Reading A dissertation submitted by Anne Moore In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English T U F T S U N I V E R S I T Y May 2012 Adviser: Joseph Litvak ii Abstract: Borrowing freely from reception studies, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and queer theory, After the Break presents a model of the engaged serial reader as a fan: one who reads with intense affective investment in both the figure of the author and the narrative world, and does so as part of a community of readers. Each chapter features a Victorian novel and a contemporary serial television show. Juxtaposing these narratives illuminates how their simultaneous status as a series of parts and a coherent whole elicits a set of excessive, “fannish” responses that are shaped by this simultaneity: affection and resentment, desire and satiation, ending and always beginning again. Devoted readers find ways to remain critically engaged with the narratives they love even as they’re inescapably reminded of the myriad ways that these texts will inevitably fail them. Since the formal and affective excess of the serial is central to my argument as a whole, I begin with an analysis of the connection between the serial’s formal excess and the imaginary relationship between the reader and writer that is established over the serial’s run. I then shift my attention to the narratalogical issue of textual boundaries, showing how the disrupted and disruptive limits of the serial are impossible to fix, and how this quality lends the serial its uncanny power over readers. In my third chapter, I examine this power more closely, especially focusing on the ways that serials elicit compulsive reading. I end with a coda that considers Twin Peaks as an example of the serial’s inevitable failures, and how this “failure” is key to the form’s ability to worm its way into reader’s heads. iii Acknowledgements: Just as serial interpretation happens among a community, so did the process of writing this dissertation. At times, that process felt endless, and I came to intimately know the desire for closure I refer to so frequently in the following pages. These are the people who helped me to appreciate the journey and had faith that the story of my dissertation would one day end. First, thanks to my writing group: Carolyn Croissant, Claudia Stumpf , and Cynthia Schoolar Williams read drafts both early and late. Without their help, I would have become bogged down in my unshakable conviction that I can and should say everything. If this dissertation is no longer a sprawling, monstrous thing, my readers have these three to thank. Thanks, too, to my larger community of friends and family who engaged in endless conversations about television, novels and the details of readerly pleasure: Alana Kumbier, Tom Dodson, Ben Owen, Christopher Willard, Nino Testa, Molly Wilder, Kristina Aikens, Amy Woodbury Tease, Selene Colburn, Isaac Butler, Sarah Wright, Crow Cohen, David Gramling, and Domenica Ruta. Many thanks to my second academic community at the International Society for the Study of Narrative, especially Sean O’Sullivan, Kelly McGuire, Antje Anderson, Jean Wyatt, and Robyn Warhol. Since my first year attending as the graduate assistant organizing the conference, I have been warmly welcomed and confronted with ideas both challenging and beautiful. I began my graduate career at the University of Vermont, and am deeply grateful to the faculty there for taking me seriously until I could learn do so myself, especially Valerie Rohy, Lisa Schnell, Mary Lou Kete, and Robyn Warhol. iv At Tufts, I have received guidance both generous and rigorous, and have been consistently pushed to make my ideas simultaneously more complicated and easier to understand. I am especially grateful to my dissertation committee: Joe Litvak, whose incisive readings helped me to trust my ideas while also seeing where they were falling short; Sonia Hofkosh, who always brings my attention to the nuances of the reading process and brings that nuance to bear as a reader, John Lurz, whose last-minute arrival coincided with a much-needed delivery of clarity; and Robyn Warhol, without whose encouragement I would never have gone to graduate school in the first place, and without whose support I certainly wouldn’t have stayed. To my family: my parents Ellen and Thad Moore, my sisters Kate, Fernanda, Jessie, and Lisa, and my brother Sean, as well as my in-laws, Fran and Larry Brown and Tami and Steve Lucker. Thanks for support, love, and a bracing combination of qualities that reminds me daily of the productive value of a both/and approach to life. A special thanks to Bubbe Fran for her endless free childcare, and to Claudia Stumpf, my emotional Sherpa. Without their help with the daily minutiae of life, I’d have given up long ago. But most of all for Ariel and Izzy—I can’t wait to see what the next installment of our story brings us. v Table of Contents Introduction—Caution: Spoilers Ahead……………………………………………1 Chapter One—Serial Excess: Writing, Reading, Feeling…………………………...30 Chapter Two—The Serial Uncanny: Closure, Repetition, Boundaries……………..77 Chapter Three—Serial Addicts: Addiction, Detection, Compulsion……………...122 Coda—Serial Failures: Twin Peaks and the Pleasures of Being a Loser……………166 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...183 1 Caution: Spoilers Ahead “I have always loved to read.” When I first applied to a graduate program in English Literature, this is how I wanted to begin my personal statement. The image of myself, under the covers with a flashlight, long past my bedtime, seemed to me the logical precursor to a future devoted to the study of literature, particularly narrative fiction. I was promptly disabused of this notion by the first friend to whom I showed my essay. Her objection (the same one I now pass along to my own students) was that it should go without saying that I love to read; my job was to show my future professors that I could demonstrate the kind of critical distance that would transform me from a mere reader to a critic. But here’s the thing: I have always loved to read, and that love provides the energy for my critical work. Although I can’t make this claim for other critics, I know I could never write about a text I didn’t love—I would get too bored, the process would be unbearable. To be clear, when I say “love,” I mean something different from unstinting acceptance and affection—I mean an excess of feeling, both positive and negative. I mean the kind of response to a text that you feel compelled to share, whether it’s an angry response to a poor film adaptation of your favorite novel or the result of an online quiz that tells you which Jane Austen character you most resemble.1 I mean the excessive, embarrassing response of a fan. 1 FYI: I’m Marianne Dashwood. 2 Fannish reading follows the pattern of enthusiasm: loud, infectious, earnest, and concerned with style but never itself particularly stylish.2 One of my aims in this emphasis on the “feeling” of reading is to take seriously the affection for the imaginary worlds of fiction that brought most of us to literary study in the first place. Where does that love come from? How is it created and sustained? What are its consequences, both positive and negative? And how do stories grab hold of us so hard that we can’t stop talking about them, past the point of good taste and reason? In order to answer these questions, this dissertation examines Victorian serialized novels and postmodern serial television shows, focusing specifically on the similar responses that these seemingly distinct forms elicit in their audiences. I base my argument in two theoretical traditions—media/cultural studies and queer theory—all with an emphasis on narrative form. The thread of cultural studies initiated by Henry Jenkins which focuses on fan communities offers an invaluable model for considering the intense affective investment displayed by groups of readers. Jenkins and the critics who have followed him such as Matt Hills and Jonathan Gray look at a wide range of texts and focus their analysis on the habits and patterns of groups of readers, with special emphasis on how hierarchies of taste are disassembled, reassembled, and maintained among these groups. As this emphasis on the behavior of readers suggests, their methodology is rooted in anthropology more than literary study. Jenkins, for instance, only includes 2 This is as good a place as any to point out that the footnotes are the “official” space of excess in this dissertation. I am not only analyzing the excessive interpretive energy of the fan, but am also performing it—as I will go on to argue, it’s impossible to critically engage with a serial narrative without excess. The footnotes, more than any other space in this dissertation, embody the excess of fandom. 3 descriptions of the shows in question in order to give context for fannish responses to them. By pairing Victorian novels with television shows, I shift my focus to the relationship between the narrative structure of the serial and the excessive response of the fan. Especially in my first chapter, I consider contemporary responses to texts from both periods, but I do so in order to examine what texts do to readers, not so much what readers do to texts. At the same time, I hope that my examination and performance of enthusiastic reading will demonstrate how the positions of scholar and fan are not as different as they might at first appear to be.