Course info

At the heart of this course is the belief in the necessity of reading a TV series’ reception alongside the respective TV show’s aesthetics. In following Frank Kelleter's Serial Agencies, we will try to understand how an American television series can mobilize "practices and values that help stabilize America’s conflict-ridden conceptualization of itself" (2). In this sense, we will have a closer look at TV shows such as The Wire, Lost, The Walking Dead, and True Detective and try to formulate a theoretical framework that bridges the gaps between Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Niklas Luhmann’s social-systems theory. This way, American television as an actor-network will be understood as encompassing both the television narrative and the accompanying communicative practices (cf. ibid. 5). In other words, we will argue that the TV shows studied in this course can generate structures that allow them to read themselves and to unleash scripts that grant their readers to do what the narrative concedes them to do (cf. ibid. 27) — we are interested in learning more about their serial agencies that keeps them “structurally geared toward its own return and multiplication” (ibid. 29).