History of series and stories in series
The public course “…en séries…” of the Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures (CIEL) of the University of Lausanne is dedicated this fall semester 2019 to serial narrative and to literary, cinematographic and artistic series. In conjunction with this public course, the collection managers at the Unithèque website offer you a selection of documents on serial narrative and its variations over the centuries, from Antiquity to the present day, from Ovid to Game of Thrones, from serial novels to Hollywood franchises. Discover this thematic selection in the Renouvaud catalog, as well as on the Unithèque website, accompanied by a selection of series DVDs at Cinespace, from October 8 to 22, 2019.
Thinking about seriality as a transhistorical, transcultural and transmedia phenomenon
The spectacular success of contemporary TV series, which has led to the emergence of a sériephilie contaminating academic research, has come to profoundly transform our view of serial narrative. Back in 2014, the History and Aesthetics of Cinema Section at the University of Lausanne offered a Master’s course entirely dedicated to contemporary TV series, with analyses covering not only historical, aesthetic and theoretical issues, but also questions relating to the reception of TV series via the press, blogs, forums and so on.
From a comparative perspective, the most prestigious contemporary TV series are relegitimizing practices as old as storytelling itself: myths, legends, biblical narratives, fairy tales, medieval cycles, serial novels and novellas are all cultural productions that make the closed, planned work of an author seem like a cultural singularity. But from soap operas to Perceval, from the Twelve Labors of Hercules to Breaking Bad, we need to take into account the infinite nuances of these cultural series.
One of the great merits of series is that they highlight the dependence of works on their context of production and reception, and underline the properties of partially improvised aesthetic forms, helping us to move away from our fascination with stable, finished structures. As a result, we can see that narrative bricolage can also have its own qualities, and that the pleasure we derive from “assembly-line” fiction, to use the terminology of comparatist Matthieu Letourneux, is not always that of a comfortable, tasteless repetition of the same old thing.
Ever since cinema, and then television, gained their letters of nobility and became, like other media and means of communication, objects of theoretical thought, academic work has multiplied. In the field of narratology, cinematographic and televisual narratives have helped to rethink the concept of plot(Les rouages de l’intrigue) and to develop a transmedia narratological theory(Sérialité et transmédialité). The study of the fictional character has been renewed, notably by the research of semiologist François Jost, who will give a lecture on villains in contemporary American TV series on December 4, 2019, as part of the public course.
Literary series and/or TV series?
By flooding the global media market with series, HBO and Netflix have pushed to the limit the phenomenon of “the technical reproducibility of the work of art”, theorized by Walter Benjamin as early as 1935. Yet it would be wrong to believe that cinema and television invented the serial narrative. Of course, Game of Thrones has generated – and continues to generate – a popular fervor beyond compare, but literature is not to be outdone.
As Danielle Aubry shows, contemporary TV series are part of the tradition of 19th and 20th century episodic publications, of which the serial novel is one of the most accomplished expressions. In her doctoral thesis defended at the University of Lausanne in 2018, Anaïs Goudmand analyzes in a transmedia way the experience of narrative seriality, from Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842-1843) to Downton Abbey (2010-2015). The writing and rewriting of myths over the centuries, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the proliferation of cycles in the Middle Ages, the vogue for the river novel in the Baroque and Classical eras, such as Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, the triumph of novelistic cycles, and the publication and mass distribution of fairy tales in collections, then magazines, are all declensions of serial forms and invitations to read in series(es). The genre of the roman noir lends itself particularly well to serial narration, perhaps because it is based, in part, on the figures of serial killers, of whom Henry VIII offers a striking historical example.
Many successful franchises, soap operas and TV series are adaptations of literary series, or take a story originally told in literary form and turn it into a series. If the plot of Game of Thrones, created by D. Benioff and D. B. Weiss, follows the plot of A Song of Ice and Fire, the George R. R. Martin saga from which it was adapted, relatively faithfully, before gradually moving beyond it. Other series, such as Once Upon a Time, draw their inspiration more freely from Bill Willingham’s collection of American comic books, Fables.
The influence of television series on our societies and cultures is such that some literary authors are adopting the codes of scriptwriting to create new literary serials. With Stand-by, novelists Bruno Pellegrino, Aude Seigne and Daniel Vuataz bring the literary soap opera genre back to the fore. They will unveil the second season of their opus at the close of the public lecture on December 11, 2019.
If you’d like to find out more, or simply get carried away by a serial story, come and discover our selection of documents and DVDs at the Unithèque, or browse them from home at this address. More in the next episode…
Joëlle Légeret
Head of linguistics and modern languages collections, BCUL site Unithèque
