Seriality in New Media
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University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2019 TO BE CONTINUED: SERIALITY IN NEW MEDIA Ryan Engley University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Engley, Ryan, "TO BE CONTINUED: SERIALITY IN NEW MEDIA" (2019). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 881. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/881 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TO BE CONTINUED: SERIALITY IN NEW MEDIA BY RYAN ENGLEY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2019 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF RYAN ENGLEY APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor Naomi Mandel Carolyn Betensky Scott Kushner Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2019 ABSTRACT Seriality has maintained a pervasive presence across media for over a century. Despite widespread critical and popular interest into seriality and serial texts, very few book- length theories of seriality have been attempted. Though uncommented upon critically, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan have both offered insights into seriality that this dissertation puts in dialogue with serial media texts. My dissertation begins in the Victorian era with Freud’s encounter with serial fiction through Charles Dickens. I then turn to looking at new media texts such as the “Twitterature” of Jennifer Egan and Joshua Clover, the first season of Sarah Koenig’s and WEBZ-Chicago’s Serial podcast, and Netflix’s streaming television series Stranger Things. This dissertation imagines a double intervention into the study of seriality and into psychoanalytic theory: I explicate and develop the extant serial concerns of psychoanalysis and then, through serial media examples, I advance a theory of seriality. This is a new reading of psychoanalytic theory as a body of thought primarily concerned with seriality and the consequences of theorizing the gap constitutive of seriality. I find that by attending to the psychic impact of the serial form in early Freudian psychoanalysis, and later in work from Jacques Lacan, we can understand the foundational influence of media texts in understanding our psychic lives. While it is common to find in scholarship today that psychoanalysis is a theoretical relic of the past and has nothing new to teach us, I argue that—amidst a so-called crisis of theory in the academy since deconstruction—psychoanalysis may be the only theory that is ready to grapple with our contemporary serial media landscape, as it is uniquely able to examine serial media’s ubiquity in our daily lives. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my advisor, Naomi Mandel, and my entire dissertation committee for working so closely with me on this project: Carolyn Betensky, Scott Kushner, Christine Mok, and Kyle Kusz. Thanks also to David Faflik, for his time on my committee and his willingness to talk about English football. Special thanks to my additional outside committee member, Joan Copjec, for always being a fierce supporter of my ideas, and whose work in engaging psychoanalysis and media has been an invaluable inspiration to me. I am grateful for Todd McGowan on this front, as well. The focus of this dissertation is the culmination of my early thoughts on television and psychoanalysis that came while under his guidance at the University of Vermont’s M.A. program. Todd remains my most antagonistic interlocutor. Finally, I’m grateful for the support of friends and family who have been cheering me on from the beginning. Specifically, my parents, Linda and Chuck; my sister, Lauren; my loving partner, Kara Watts, who is my best reader and critic; and for Cat, who has been with me from the start of my graduate education. Actual final acknowledgement goes to John Colón, who will never read this. You are the present absence. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................ iv LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1 Introduction .......................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2 Serial Form, Serial Psyche: Freud’s Encounter with Dickens ....... 39 CHAPTER 3 Lacan and the Serial Real .................................................................. 69 CHAPTER 4 The Impossible Desire of Serial ....................................................... 102 CHAPTER 5 Filling the Gap .................................................................................. 130 CHAPTER 6 Conclusion: Minding the Gap ......................................................... 172 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 176 iv LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE Figure 1. Joshua Clover, #HowIQuitSpin Tweet sequence, July 19-20, 2015. ............. 1 Figure 2. Steven Johnson, Story threads per minute table, from Everything Bad is Good for You, 70. ........................................................................................................ 13 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Seriality has maintained an increasingly pervasive presence across media for over a century. From the nineteenth-century novel, to early film, to popular radio broadcasts including the soap opera, up to the contemporary moment’s podcasts, television, short experimental fiction, and even the form of digital content in Twitter or Instagram stories, the form has defined the last hundred or so years of transatlantic media experience. Media theorists have long sought to understand why the serial form has been so pervasive, and what its lasting hold means. Some say that it is a brand of consumerist interaction with media. Others find it part of the critical interpretive process through reader or reception theory. Still others find it to be an element in service of assessing the Victorian novel’s development, of television’s rise in the mid- twentieth century or what is called television’s second Golden Age in the early 2000s. Others find seriality a component of narrative theory or operating within new television theory. But in these examinations, seriality rarely reaches a full theorization. In this dissertation, I set out a theory of seriality that—while it does have ties to capital, consumerism, and interpretation—supersedes these typical categories of meaning that media scholars have voiced. I argue that psychoanalysis is primarily a theory of seriality. The serial form of cultural production is one that philosophers, pop- cultural critics, sociologists, and economists have all acknowledged as a dominant and immanent cultural form of the modern and contemporary moment. By looking at 1 discrete instances of the serial form, such as Sigmund Freud’s reading of Charles Dickens, Jacques Lacan’s reading of coinflips in “The Purloined Letter,” the Twitterature of Jennifer Egan and Joshua Clover, the first season of the Serial podcast, and Netflix’s streaming television series Stranger Things, this dissertation reaches a theory of seriality by thoroughly considering the serial gap—the one immanent requirement for anything to be considered serial—and what it does to texts and how it corresponds to a fundamental gap in the psyche discovered by psychoanalysis. What Is Seriality? The Oxford English Dictionary defines seriality as a “Serial arrangement; the fact or state of being arranged or ordered in a series” (“seriality” n.). The Library of Congress adds that “A serial is expected to continue indefinitely.”1 Media scholars such as Jason Mittell and Shane Denson add additional characteristics, such as temporality and consumerist production, to the form’s necessary qualities. Perpetuity, for example, is a seemingly natural component of seriality. Two further contexts show us slight differences in other resonances of seriality that are worth noting. In music, the serial is “a method of composition based on a fixed sequence of tones” (“serial” adj. A. 8). In linguistics, “Of, relating to, or designating a pattern of syntax in which constituent words appear in a series” (“serial” adj. A. 6). Defined as it is above, as a pattern or arrangement existing in perpetuity, seriality appears to be a structure secondary to other concerns – from audience or reception trends, to the development of other genres, to the commerciality of the form. Because of this, seriality never gets top billing in media scholarship, despite its recent 2 surge as topic of scholarly interest. At stake is more often an inquiry into something else. Whether it is the Victorian novel, early film serials, soap operas, serial television, or simply narrative in general, seriality appears as a necessary term to use while illuminating some other text, context, or concept. As such, seriality itself has rarely been theorized across media, leaving us with a gap in media scholarship.2 Lauren Goodlad summarizes the recent surge of seriality studies over