Mind the Gaps: Serial Media Forms and the Affective Work of Audiences by Anne Mecklenburg A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2020 Doctoral Committee: Professor Adela Pinch, Co-Chair Professor Yeidy Rivero, Co-Chair Professor Daniel Hack Associate Professor Daniel Herbert Anne Mecklenburg [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1268-1272 © Anne Mecklenburg 2020 Acknowledgements Revising this project during a stay-at-home order was a daunting, isolating, and sometimes frightening prospect, especially because my work as a graduate student has been sustained for so many years by the communities I have found here at Michigan and throughout my life. How could I contemplate a dissertation on form and community when the only person I saw for days on end was my cat (who incidentally, does not give good writing feedback)? Of course, as I learned over the past couple months, many Zoom calls and track-changes-enabled Google Docs later, all the support and solidarity I had learned to rely on during my first six years at Michigan was still there. First, I would like to thank my dissertation committee. My co-chairs, Adela Pinch and Yeidy Rivero, encouraged me to write towards my weirdest questions, trusted me as I figured out the shape and dimensions of this thing I was writing, and helped me see it clearly, in all its possibilities. Whenever I talked with Adela, Yeidy, Danny Hack, and Dan Herbert, their comments always reflected back to me a better version of the project than what I’d written, while also giving me exactly the kind of feedback I needed, to help me move toward what I most wanted it to be. I would also like to thank the English Department and the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, the English Department Writing Program, and the Rackham Graduate School for their financial and logistical support of this project. Thank you in particular to the staff in the English Department, in FTVM, and at EDWP – especially ii Senia Vasquez, Jan Burgess, Lisa Curtis, Denise Looker, Thea Bude, and Carrie Moore – who have calmly and generously fielded many of my panicked emails. Thank you to the communities of scholars whose feedback and mentorship throughout my academic career have continually shaped both this project and myself. Thank you in particular to Nick Gilbert and Melinda Salata, who taught me to think and write playfully. And to my professors at Swarthmore, especially Rachel Buurma, who taught me how to read nineteenth- century novels as capacious, contradictory, and strange; Patty White, who taught me how to write about film and then let me write about TV instead; and Dan Grodner and Frank Durgin, who taught me to be amazed by language. I would also like to thank Marie Forgeard, Eranda Jayawickreme, and Annie Roepke, who invited me into their community and who helped me learn how to research creatively. Thank you to the members of the Nineteenth Century Forum and the Media Studies Research Workshop at Michigan, whose feedback and generative conversations helped develop this project, and to my cohorts (and expanded cohorts) in English and FTVM. Lastly, I would like to thank my dissertation writing groups for reading countless drafts of this dissertation, often multiple times, for helping me work out tricky writing problems in every coffee shop in Ann Arbor (thank you also to all the baristas who had to listen to these monologues but could only intervene with pity-coffee), and for going to see the One Direction movie After in theaters on opening night “for research.” This dissertation truly would not exist without Katy Peplin, Kayti Lausch, Sean Donovan, Lauren Eriks Cline, Maia Farrar, Sheila Coursey, Laura Strout, Amanda Greene, Joey Gamble, Lisa Jong, Alena Aniskiewicz, and Adrianne Spunaugle. Even beyond the mentorship, support, friendship, and feedback that I have received, all of which made this project possible in a very material sense, I also realized as I revised it this iii summer that I had been embedding my own communities into the text of my dissertation all along, and that I could find them there, even when I was alone at my desk. So thank you to my family, who have always cheered me on (even when they’re teasing me for reading academic monographs at the beach), have lent me most of the mystery novels I’ve ever read, and have never spoiled the endings. Thank you to Lily Kruglak, Anisha Jindia, and Isaac Katz, with whom I watched a lot of CSI as an impressionable teen, and who introduced me to Television Without Pity, which transformed my understanding of what both television and writing could be. Thank you to the Avengers group chat (as you are named in my phone) for every hours-long argument about Captain America, and for transforming my understanding of what a scholarly community could be. Thank you to the denizens of the Serenity apartment, but especially Sirkka Natti and Amber Kavka-Warren, who encouraged me as I applied to graduate school, and who sent me my first One Direction YouTube link. And thank you also to the Groupon deal that prompted me, Kayti Lausch, Katy Peplin, and Kelly Thomas to attend a One Direction concert on a whim, which changed my life (and this dissertation) in countless ways. Thank you for a whole lot of history. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures vi Abstract vii Introduction: Bad Timing 1 Chapter 1 : “Everybody’s Secrets”: Sensation Fiction, Serial Gaps, and Unspoken Knowledge 26 Chapter 2 : “Mystery Solved”: Secrets, Procedural Characters, and Friendship on CBS’s Elementary 63 Chapter 3 : Imagined Economies: Suspense, Spoilers, and the Payoffs of Contemporary Television Serials 100 Chapter 4 : “Hotel Rooms and New Tattoos”: The Seriality of One Direction 138 Conclusion: Precarious Comfort 176 Bibliography 183 v List of Figures Figure 1: No Name, end of “Sixth Scene” and beginning of “Between the Scenes,” in All the Year Round, vol. 8, 29 Nov 1862, p. 271 ………………………………………………………. 38 Figure 2: RBB’s first appearance in London, 6 June 2014 …………………………………… 138 Figure 3: RBB surrounded by John Waters and Divine references in Baltimore, 8 August 2015……………………………………………………………………………………………. 139 Figure 4: Four bears (one for each One Direction member) recreating the opening of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” video, posted to Twitter on 21 December 2015 ……………………... 139 Figure 5: Sequence of RBB’s appearances in August 2015 ………………………………….. 164 Figure 6: Entry for RBB’s appearance in Detroit, 29 August 2015 …………………………... 165 vi Abstract Mind the Gaps: Serial Media Forms and the Affective Work of Audiences develops a theory of serial form as a collectively generated audience construct. This project draws upon serial narratives from nineteenth-century British sensation novels to contemporary television and fan practices, emphasizing the interdisciplinary and transhistorical nature of serial form. It engages specifically with serial narratives that might be considered “failures” of suspense: mysteries whose solutions are obvious, stories that are “spoiled” ahead of time, and fan practices that emphasize repetition. I argue that seriality is produced and maintained, not only through the strategic withholding and deferral of knowledge, but also through audiences’ conditional and unstated knowledge of what is true, and of what will probably happen narratively in the future. I term this conditional feeling “precarious knowing.” Each chapter engages with a different type of serial text, from either the nineteenth century or the present, in order to develop the construct of precarious knowing in four different contexts. Chapter One reads two nineteenth-century British sensation novels, known as “novels with a secret, that each made their secrets known early in the narrative, and so invited their readers to make serial, conditional inferences. Wilkie Collins’ No Name offers multiple alternatives to what seems to be known, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret refuses to explicitly articulate what is known. Together, these novels suggest how inference- making, in addition to suspense, can sustain serial engagement. Chapter Two turns to contemporary television crime procedurals, specifically CBS’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation Elementary. This chapter applies the type of inference-making described in the first chapter to vii the process of developing attachments to serial characters, particularly in repetitive genres. Chapter Three looks at contemporary television programs and “spoiler culture” in the context of the economic metaphors that pervade contemporary discussions of serial media; metaphors like narrative “payoff,” being “invested in,” and “cheating.” By examining an instance of critical disappointment in a television program that failed to meet early expectations – namely, the Showtime spy drama Homeland – this chapter discusses the centrality of economic metaphors, which imagine a fair exchange of audience time and attention for information, to popular definitions of serial form and spoiler etiquette. Lastly, Chapter Four demonstrates how this project’s account of serial form can offer an expanded understanding of what constitutes serial media. This chapter argues specifically that fan practices surrounding what seems to be a non- serial, non-fictional object – the English/Irish boy band One Direction – can in fact be read productively as a process of collective serial narrative-writing, grounded in the inferences that fans make about the band’s members. viii Introduction: Bad Timing This dissertation, Mind the Gaps: Serial Media Forms and the Affective Work of Audiences, examines seriality through three interrelated lenses – suspense in the nineteenth- century novel, the temporality of serial television, and theories of contemporary fan practices – in order to develop an interdisciplinary theory of serial form as a collectively-generated audience construct, rather than a textual one.