The purpose of this thesis was to follow a given subject from its inception on a rectangular surface through a series of paintings to a point where the shapes and forms of the original painting culminated in a shaped surface. Each painting except the first one in the series would contain less of the subject than the preceding.

Systems of classifications are socially created and historically contingent. New classifications lead to the creation of new categories, new objects and new kinds of people. Over the last thirty years, some of the most successful categories have emerged from the study of seriality. This thesis examines the emergence of three categories of seriality, including serial murder, serial monogamy and serial arson through a genealogical analysis. This thesis argues that seriality is a complex category that involves a host of important attributes, traits, characteristics, social, legal and medical categories, institutions, expertise and knowledge. Combined, these factors shape our understandings and highlight the complexity of seriality by considering important aspects that are too often taken for granted. The focus on three diverse groups of seriality highlights the interdisciplinary nature of seriality and its growing dominance among both public and private discourse.

No description available.

This practice‐based research is a long creative work about Alan Turing. It consists of a series that includes prose, narrative poems and visual poems. An accompanying critical commentary, which is split into three sections, addresses the relationship between narrative and seriality, ways in which scientific notations can be used in visual poetry, and aspects of biographical and civil poetry. A finalsection contains a selection of creative approaches to commentary that reflect on research in a manner that is complementary to the critical commentary. The research was carried out through a process of repeated planning and experimentation that has resulted in a variety of forms and procedures, ranging from the accessible and conventional to the idiosyncratic and experimental. A method of investigating narrative was created by allowing narrative and serial formsto intersect throughout the creative work. A means of bringing science and literature into relation was sought through a process of forceful combination of scientific notations with literary or occult materials. And alternative possibilities for biographical poetry were investigated through resistance to celebration and through experiment with formal propertiesin poetry that could be appropriate to Turing. The creative work and critical commentary find new models for the relationship between narrative and seriality in which the will to create narrative is not denied and seriality is not a mere absence of narrative. They find new means by which science and literature can come into contact through visual poetry. They help to define a unique role for poetry in biographical writing in the way that poetry allows the subject to be embodied formally. And they set up a productive dialogue between experimental andmore established writing strategies.

In this dissertation, I examine the practice of what I term serial memoir in the second-half of the twentieth century in American literature, arguing that serial memoir represents an emerging and significant trend in life writing as it illustrates a transition in how a particular generation of writers understands lived experience and its textual representation. During the second-half of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the rapid technological advancements of postmodern and postindustrial culture, I look at the serial authorship and publication of multiple self-reflexive texts and propose that serial memoir presents a challenge to the historically privileged techniques of linear storytelling, narrative closure, and the possibility for autonomous subjectivity in American life writing. As generic boundaries become increasingly fluid, postmodern memoirists are able to be both more innovative and overt about how they have constructed the self at particular moments in time. Following the trend of examining life writing through contemporary theories about culture, narrative, and techniques of self-representation, I engage the serial memoirs of Mary McCarthy, Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, and Augusten Burroughs as I suggest that these authors iterate the self as serialized, recursive, genealogically constructed, and material. Finally, the fact that these are well-known memoirists underscores the degree to which serial memoir has become mainstream in American autobiographical writing. Serial memoir emphasizes such issues as temporality and memory, repetition and recursivity, and witnessing and testimony, and as such, my objective in this project is to theorize the practice of serial memoir, a form that has been largely neglected in critical work, as I underscore its significance in relation to twentieth-century American culture. I contend that seriality in contemporary American memoir is a burgeoning and powerful form of self-expression, and that a close examination of how authors are presenting and re-presenting themselves as they challenge conventional life writing narrative structures will influence not only the way we read and understand contemporary memoir, but will impact our approaches to self-reflexive narrative structures and provide us with new ways to understand ourselves, and our lives, in relation to the serial culture in which we live.

Over the last two centuries, mass-produced serial narratives, especially those created for women, have been vilified or ignored by literary and cultural critics. Serial narratives, which include continuing stories published in installments and independent tales that form part of an overarching plot, have been maligned for their content, for the material realities of their mass production, and most simply for their popularity. Serial texts aimed at female audiences have been subjected to further criticisms: they have been judged as being trivial or insipid in content and as lacking aesthetic merit or cultural weight. Despite these criticisms, serial narratives were exceedingly popular with audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by the end of the twentieth century became the dominant mode of storytelling across nearly all media. Popularity, far from being a reason to disparage these works, suggests the enormous power serial narratives have to both reflect and shape the culture that produces and consumes them. This cultural agency has long been overlooked, and this study hopes to change that. Serial narratives, it will be argued, train readers and viewers in various ways to actively participate in the narrative and in parallel ways in real life, an outcome especially noteworthy for modern female audiences. Ongoing and repetitive, serial narratives invite long-term engagement that enables audiences to participate imaginatively in the story itself and to embody the attitudes and behaviors of the serial protagonists in their own lives. In addition, because they are published on a potentially infinite basis, serial narratives are a medium through which modern audiences come to understand themselves and the world they inhabit. This connection between the reading and viewing choices of the modern citizen and their lived experiences, what I call serial modernism, provides a way of understanding how serial texts enact this connection particularly in relation to the modern woman’s increasing sense of agency and her continually evolving identity. Several serial texts from different eras and in different media that powerfully engage with evolving expectations of American women over the last 150 years will crystallize this connection: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series (1868-1886) and her serialized novel Work (1873); two silent film serials, The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Hazards of Helen (1914-1917); two teenage sleuth series, Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew (1930-2003) and Margaret Sutton’s Judy Bolton (1930-1967); and Sara Paretsky’s adult detective series V.I. Warshawski (1982-present).

Television viewers have no material control over the broadcast program. They cannot choose the time, when they will watch selected program that is under the command of the broadcasters. Television serial is the most asymmetric form. Every episode of the given serial promotes the next one and provides audience in advance. It is very interesting to find out, how people, who download serials, treat them. They can watch the serials, how they want. Presented work, through the qualitative analysis of the interviews with people, who watch downloaded shows, inquires whether the material control over the program sequence is the main and only motive for downloading, and also how these persons use the serials and how they communicate about them. The results and conclusions are compared with an inquiry about the respondents' way of (present or previous) watching TV (and especially serials).

Este trabalho retoma o conceito de imagem-pulsão, de Gilles Deleuze (2009), a fim de suscitar um mapeamento da ocorrência de tais imagens em filmes brasileiros de diferentes épocas. Temos como questão central a identificação de uma tendência das produções brasileiras na rememoração de um passado pulsional latente, atualizado através de imagens como a fome, a violência, a perversão e a degradação. Metodologicamente, a investigação ocorreu através da articulação de quatro procedimentos: Atenção Flutuante, de Freud (1996), Dispersão, de Foucault (2013), Serialismo e Diagrama, de Deleuze (2011b, 2013). O corpus é composto por fragmentos fílmicos (imagens ou sequências de imagens) extraídos de um grupo que conta com mais de cinquenta filmes realizados no Brasil e situados entre os anos de 1950 e 2014. / This work studies the impulse-image concept created by Gilles Deleuze and aims to identify impulse-image’s presence in the context of Brazilian movies at different times. We suggest, as a fundamental question, the existence of Brazilian productions tendency to bring back images from a pulsional past that materialize as images about hungry, violence, perversion and degradation. Three methodological procedures were used, they are: Freud’s (1996) suspended-attention, Foucault’s (2013) dispersion and Deleuzes’s (2011b, 2013) seriality and diagram. As corpus the analysis has filmic fragments (plans or sequences of plans) extracted from a group that contains more than fifty movies produced in Brazil between 1950 and 2014.

Este trabalho retoma o conceito de imagem-pulsão, de Gilles Deleuze (2009), a fim de suscitar um mapeamento da ocorrência de tais imagens em filmes brasileiros de diferentes épocas. Temos como questão central a identificação de uma tendência das produções brasileiras na rememoração de um passado pulsional latente, atualizado através de imagens como a fome, a violência, a perversão e a degradação. Metodologicamente, a investigação ocorreu através da articulação de quatro procedimentos: Atenção Flutuante, de Freud (1996), Dispersão, de Foucault (2013), Serialismo e Diagrama, de Deleuze (2011b, 2013). O corpus é composto por fragmentos fílmicos (imagens ou sequências de imagens) extraídos de um grupo que conta com mais de cinquenta filmes realizados no Brasil e situados entre os anos de 1950 e 2014. / This work studies the impulse-image concept created by Gilles Deleuze and aims to identify impulse-image’s presence in the context of Brazilian movies at different times. We suggest, as a fundamental question, the existence of Brazilian productions tendency to bring back images from a pulsional past that materialize as images about hungry, violence, perversion and degradation. Three methodological procedures were used, they are: Freud’s (1996) suspended-attention, Foucault’s (2013) dispersion and Deleuzes’s (2011b, 2013) seriality and diagram. As corpus the analysis has filmic fragments (plans or sequences of plans) extracted from a group that contains more than fifty movies produced in Brazil between 1950 and 2014.

Este trabalho retoma o conceito de imagem-pulsão, de Gilles Deleuze (2009), a fim de suscitar um mapeamento da ocorrência de tais imagens em filmes brasileiros de diferentes épocas. Temos como questão central a identificação de uma tendência das produções brasileiras na rememoração de um passado pulsional latente, atualizado através de imagens como a fome, a violência, a perversão e a degradação. Metodologicamente, a investigação ocorreu através da articulação de quatro procedimentos: Atenção Flutuante, de Freud (1996), Dispersão, de Foucault (2013), Serialismo e Diagrama, de Deleuze (2011b, 2013). O corpus é composto por fragmentos fílmicos (imagens ou sequências de imagens) extraídos de um grupo que conta com mais de cinquenta filmes realizados no Brasil e situados entre os anos de 1950 e 2014. / This work studies the impulse-image concept created by Gilles Deleuze and aims to identify impulse-image’s presence in the context of Brazilian movies at different times. We suggest, as a fundamental question, the existence of Brazilian productions tendency to bring back images from a pulsional past that materialize as images about hungry, violence, perversion and degradation. Three methodological procedures were used, they are: Freud’s (1996) suspended-attention, Foucault’s (2013) dispersion and Deleuzes’s (2011b, 2013) seriality and diagram. As corpus the analysis has filmic fragments (plans or sequences of plans) extracted from a group that contains more than fifty movies produced in Brazil between 1950 and 2014.