Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life

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.

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.

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, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life 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.

Author: Ryan Engley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 08/20/2026
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9798216197782
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Comparative Literature
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Psychology | Psychotherapy | Psychoanalysis

About the Author
Ryan Engley is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA. He is series editor of Film Theory in Practice (Bloomsbury) and co-hosts the Why Theory podcast.