Publication details
Teorie seriálové fikce : možné cesty naratologické analýzy televizního seriálu
| Title in English | Serial fiction theory : possible narratological analysis techniques for the television serial |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This study puts forward an originally conceived, integrated theory for (television) serial fiction, in which in my view the term serial has two meanings: serial and series. While the novel and the film present a completed unit, a serial is basically a work presented to the viewer in parts. It ought to be theoretically graspable and analysable even when it has not yet been de facto concluded and its fictional world is still growing or is going to grow again after a certain time. In my view the fictional world (macroworld) of a serial is superordinate to the episodic structure, i.e. the worlds of the individual episodes. As such it determines or modifies the system of regulative principles under which the stories unfold within and across individual episodes. The basis for theorizing over serial fiction then involves a cyclical process for generating a fictional world. This is accompanied by the hypothetical entity of a cognitively active viewer watching the serial, in certain circumstances determined by the text. The study then focuses on devices which I have created or recreated to explain the nature of this process: fictization, fictipedia and the fictional world. By these means I describe (a) possible text strategies mediating the impulse stream (fictization), (b) the hypothetical viewer’s strategies for processing them and arranging them into mutual relations (fictipedia) and (c) the (re)construction of a fictional world and the stories that take place there, the tension between the action taking place and the the fictional world being of great importance for serial fiction theory. I take this into account in my proposition on narrative dynamics based on the ongoing confrontation of microworlds and subworlds which gives rise to narrative flows. The proposed theory aims primarily to be flexible, to illustrate the nature of serial fiction in all its aesthetic richness and to adapt to its potentials – not the opposite. |