To be continued … – Mosse Lectures

Creativity and Originality are bound up with the individual and unique work of art. But ever since “Arabian Nights” and the 19th century serial novels of Charles Dickens and Eugène Sue other forms of narrative representation became popular: namely stories spanning several episodes with the promise that the storyline is to be continued beyond the cliffhanger, maybe indefinitely. The single story becomes a variation in the narrative pattern with contingent beginnings and uncertain endings. The “aesthetics of the serial”, playfully elaborated by Umberto Eco, is not just a timely mode of industrial and media production, statistics and digital calculation. Not only the variant but variation as such, the regular irregularity with its potential of virtual infinity may cause aesthetic pleasure. Difference may be explored in repetition. To be sure, the narrative formats of telenovelas and soap operas foster consumerism. However, ritualization in the serial form of produc-tion can create more than affirmation. Gertrude Stein’s “rhythm of being” favors continuation und duration in mere presence, indulgence in the promotion of the ever same as divergent. The MOSSE-LECTURES of the summer semester 2012 will focus attention on the new narrative forms of complexity and ambiguity in high quality television series, revisiting at the same time the serial structures of novels, and observing the production of different forms of art, film, video and interactive modes of narration.