Psychoanalytic Horizons Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life, (Hardcover)

<p><b>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.</b> </p><p>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. </p><p>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, <i>Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life </i>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.</p>

• Psychoanalytic Horizons Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life, (Hardcover)
• Author: Assistant Professor of Media Studies Ryan Engley
• ISBN: 9798216197799
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2026-08-20
• Page Count: 240