With its play of repetition and variation, resemblance and difference, simultaneity and succession, breaks and continuities, the concept of seriality has become an increasingly vital mode of cultural and aesthetic expression across media since the mid-19th century. If Victorian novels and Japanese Mangas shared a preference for periodical publication, the invention of serial photography proved a critical step towards the invention of cinema, which soon established the convention of including episodes of serial movies in Saturday matinées. The American modernist painters from the 1960s gave new significance to their medium by developing works in series, and around the millennial turn TV-series gave rise to complex forms of serial fiction. Seriality has also been explored as a mode of thought by such diverse thinkers as Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, and Stanley Cavell, among others.

This seminar seeks to explore seriality as a concept and as an aesthetic form. We are especially interested in contributions that explore the very idea of series as such; that delve into the specificity of or distinctions between various kinds of series; or that look into particularly interesting case studies of writers, artists, or works that employ or experiment with this form. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• The concept of series
• The idea of serial thought
• Explorations of time in series
• Formal experiments with series or seriality in specific media, incl. literature, film, and television
• Thematic expressions of seriality in fiction (e.g. serial killers, clones…)
• Historical developments of the serial form and its cultural significance
• Connections between technological developments and forms of seriality
• Recent developments of seriality in computer-based media, the web, and AI