![]() In order to see whether this seems at all possible, the paper examines the most recent television series, Star-Crossed, in which the original Shakespearean narrative unit (Romeo and Juliet) is broken up into several episodes, thus adopting the most popular televisual genre of our time. The paper investigates the ways Shakespeare’s oeuvre, with its reputation for a universal adaptability that embraces all media and contexts, finds its way into a serial structure that is the dominant form of visual performance today. We will do so with particular reference to heavily serialized shows both in US and in Europe. Finally, we will argue that these strategies can raise issues that risk to make the narrative experience of contemporary TV series less valuable. We will present what we consider the two main fi lling strategies in contemporary TV series, namely the fl ash strategy 3 and the strand strategy 4. We will argue that these two options are not suffi cient in order to fi ll the TV series' amount of time. ![]() We will show that, with respect to this issue, contemporary TV series primarily face two options, which we will call the super-knot and the super-knotty rope. More specifi cally, according to Aristotle, " Every tragedy is in part Complication and in part Denouement the incidents before the opening scene, and often certain also of those within the play, forming the Complication and the rest the Denouement ". We will argue that this vast amount of time can confl ict with the structural constraints of formulaic narrative, especially from an Aristotelian perspective according to which a narrative is inherently a knot to be untied. ![]() There are so many contemporary series considered experimental in time structure that, as Melissa Ames puts it, " although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the twenty-fi rst century never before has narrative time played such an important role in mainstream television " 2. As suggested by Jason Mittell, time is constitutive of TV seriality: " a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time " and also " time is an essential element of all storytelling but is even more crucial for television " or " seriality itself is defi ned by its use of time " 1. This paper starts by claiming that the amount of narrative time is one of the distinctive features by virtue of which TV series are treated as a self-standing appreciative kind in contemporary culture.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |