Mind the Gaps: Serial Media Forms and the Affective Work of Audiences

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 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.