Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life - Hardcover
$162.00
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$162.00
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Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life - Hardcover
$162.00
Sale price
$162.00
Regular price
by Ryan Engley (Author)
This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.
The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative - from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books - seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality - in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint - names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear. Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically - serially - connected.Author Biography
Ryan Engley is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA. He is series editor of Film Theory in Practice (Bloomsbury) and co-hosts the Why Theory podcast.
Number of Pages: 240
Dimensions: 0.56 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: August 20, 2026