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WiSe 19/20: Affect, Digitality, and Popular Seriality

Maximilian Stobbe

Kommentar

The turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences, succinctly described by Margaret Wetherell as a widespread “desire to recognize the way the world moves us” (2014), has yielded numerous insights regarding the affective dynamics of digital media and our experiences of fiction respectively. Yet in the field of popular seriality studies, there is still room to theoretically undergird the various ways in which American original series and serialized adaptations – especially at a time when they proliferate abundantly on digital platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video – generate their potentials to affect us. On an elementary level, this seminar will therefore serve as an introduction to seminal approaches to affectivity and popular seriality; more importantly, however, we will seek to bring these theoretical fields together in order to explore and conceptualize the ways in which contemporary digital series can ‘move’ their audiences – and not just by getting them emotionally ‘invested’ in specific characters or storylines. We will pay equal, if not closer, attention to the structural implications of the binge-watching model, to the various social media practices surrounding these series, to their intertextual and metamedial play, to their engagement with recent sociopolitical events, to their self-positioning within genre conventions, to the specificities of their digital publishing platforms, and to their strategies of adaptation, among other phenomena. The examples we will investigate will include, but are not limited to, Black Mirror (2011–), Sense8 (2015-18), Stranger Things (2016–), Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017-19), The Haunting of Hill House (2018–), YOU (2018–), The Boys (2019–), and Good Omens (2019). We will not have the time to consider all of our examples in their entirety in the course of this seminar, but since studying seriality always necessitates many hours of watching, students are encouraged to sample and/or binge as much of these series as they can manage before the start of the semester. An organizational note: Most of the examples on which we will focus are found on Netflix and Amazon Prime, so students are advised to ensure access to these streaming portals to adequately participate in this course. Schließen