123422 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2016W)

Currently, the epic form of narration is celebrating a comeback, and a whole generation of viewers seems to be altering its viewing habits: giving up channel surfing as a visual mode of consumption in favour of binge watching and replacing traditional TV by streaming services. There are some pitfalls, can which threaten academic discussions of serials, TV series and the phenomenon of seriality: succumbing to a discourse of fandom, which exhausts itself in an exchange of favourite moments; or shutting out people who are not intimately familiar with the series under discussion; or remaining satisfied with analysing plots, characterisation and aesthetics without getting at each series’ concept and, as a consequence, under-theorising seriality; or cramming the course with too many well-beloved series at the cost of insight about what’s typical about each one, and about how it adds to the debates on seriality. This course aims to avoid all of these.
The syllabus will be structured by the relationship between seriality and three different genres, which have been dominating TV-series for years. We are going to concentrate on crime & detection and politics, while also dedicating some time to theory texts, which grapple with underlying philosophical problems of seriality. Since the serial as a genre is a Victorian literary invention we shall start by looking at excerpts from the first two Sherlock Holmes-novels and the first three short stories of the Holmes canon, then move on to TV series aired on the BBC, on HBO and Netflix, and end with a final lesson on meta-seriality, which loops back to the Victorian seriality of Gilbert & Sullivan.
The series listed below are going to be discussed in class. My hope is that you will be already familiar with at least some of them. Since we are dealing with an epic form, you wont have enough time to watch from week to week, once term has started, so please use the summer break to get through as much as you can. Part of each series is mandatory viewing (details below). If you already know more of it: great. If you manage (or find yourself needing) to watch more: perfect. There will be no organised screening sessions. Instead, each course member is responsible for her/his prep.