Populäre Serialität – Popular Seriality

Scholars from Göttingen, Darmstadt, Hannover, Tübingen, Bern, and Karlsruhe met on 16 and 17 July 2009 in this interdisciplinary workshop to present a joint proposal for the DFG-sponsored research unit “Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice.” As invited experts and commentators, Prof. Dr. Jörg Türschmann (Vienna) and Prof. Dr. Ursula Ganz-Blättler (Lugano) provided feedback and criticism.

Seriality is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of popular aesthetics. In studies of popular culture, the connection between seriality and popularity is often considered to be so obvious that the question of what distinguishes popular seriality from serial structures in other cultural fields is rarely ever considered. The research group aims to address this neglected question by investigating the formal and experiential consequences, performances, and differentiations of serial structures specific to the field of popular culture.
In a keynote speech Prof. Türschmann adressed the impact and mechanisms of popular seriality in literature and film.