Mediology And Serial Narrative, In Literature And Beyond

Understanding the seriality evolution in narration forms, and the reasons for their evolution requests a multidisciplinary perspective, based on post-McLuhanian mediology, sociologies of imaginary – starting from Durkheim tradition - and on semiotics, cultural studies, internet studies, comparative literature. The serial narrative “technologies”, in fact, re-mediate and focus areas of collective imaginary according to stable and shared rules; they serve to train and retain audiences while representing and controlling social and intrapsychic conflict; they are one of the most powerful catalysts for creating genres, mainstream works, cycles, fictional worlds, which constitute the spaces of fundamental aesthetic experience in every culture for co-production and socialization of the symbolic sphere. Technologies, together with hybridization processes and collective metaphors being structural components of the media, change over time, in the historical media-morphosis process. After briefly describing the current theoretical framework, this contribution tries outlining a general theory of the “serial engine” and of the seriality evolution over the long term: In fact, grounds and archetypes of serial phenomena are already recognizable in the literature (medieval, baroque, metropolitan). For this reason, the most intense restructuring periods may be found in the “return” of the narrative cycle in the twentieth-century multimedia environment, then in television post-series, and currently in the social networks’ hyper-fragmentation and self-serialization.