Zentralprojekt

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Frank Kelleter
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: Funded in 2013
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 68338857

During its first three years of funding, the Research Unit’s six initial subprojects investigated the following questions: (1) Which narrative forms and techniques are characteristic for popular series ("narration")? (2) Which actor-roles and acts of reception are encouraged or initiated by serial narratives specifically in the realm of popular culture, in contrast to other cultural fields ("distinction")? (3) Which cultural-historical conditions are required or promoted by popular series ("history")? At the level of narration, processes of recursivity – that is, the continual readjustment of possible continuations with respect to what has already been narrated – proved to be essential to popular seriality. As a result, it became clear that narratological approaches to popular series must be systematically correlated with actor-oriented and culturalhermeneutic perspectives, in order to adequately describe the multifaceted, historically specific, and narratively significant feedback loops between ongoing narration and ongoing reception. At the same time, it became apparent at the level of distinction that the oftentimes normative opposition, posited in many cultural studies approaches, between production (usually seen as restrictive or manipulative) and reception (usually seen as emancipatory or resistant) insufficiently accounts for the high degree of permeability that can be found in popular series between textual and paratextual or between professional and amateur practices. Concomitantly, field-theoretical hypotheses, following Bourdieu, were only partially confirmed by the material; our ethnographic subprojects unearthed a more dynamic spectrum with regard to the uses and enjoyments of popular series. Thus, it proved helpful to think of popular-serial practice according to the model of an actornetwork. Following this model, popular series can be understood as self-dynamic cultural agents (in Latour's sense), comprised not only of acting persons and institutions but also of action-conducting forms, objects, and media. Consequently, at the level of history, the significance of a cultural-ecological perspective came to the fore, i.e. an approach that analyzes the development, since the nineteenth century, of popular series as commercial and typically collaborative narrative formats in correlation with the evolving "affordances" of their media-technological and institutional environments. In accordance with these considerations, nine subprojects have been developed for a second funding period; these subprojects aim to provide (1) a firm historical grounding, (2) a conceptual consolidation, and (3) an expansion of the field of objects under investigation. Three subprojects are devoted to the early history of serial popular culture in Germany and the United States, specifically: the era prior to the Civil War when a newly commercial American popular culture came into existence (serial city mysteries); the latter half of the nineteenth century in Germany with its corresponding but culturally specific developments (German-language periodicals); and the early twentieth century, when such structures consolidated themselves in the perceptions and descriptions of a new technological "mass culture" (early American film serials). Three subprojects continue the analyses of popular serial distinction (the authorship of series as a profession), evolution (remaking as retrospective serialization), and narration (the spatiotemporal architecture of serial worlds); these subprojects aim explicitly to deepen and refine the conceptual findings of the first project phase. Three subprojects approach new objects with a view to closing gaps in existing research: They focus on the cultural variability and globalized dimension of popular seriality in one of its most productive contemporary markets (music in Indian television series), on the specificity of digital seriality in the twenty-first century (computer games), and on non-fictional formats of popular seriality (reality TV).

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1091: Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice