Seriality

Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life

Ryan Engley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216197805
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mind the Gap
• 1 Psyche Is Extended: Dickens, Marx, Freud, and Seriality’s Theoretical Beginnings
• 2 Lacan, Relation, and the Serial Symbolic
• 3 Theorizing the Cut of Seriality: Why the Quilting Point Arrests and the Master Signifier Obscures
• 4 Seriality at the Formal Limit of Television
• 5 From Film Serials to Streaming Television, or the Gaps in the Gapless
• 6 Social Media against Seriality
• 7 Radical Repetition
• Conclusion: The Serial Is Serious
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint