Zentralprojekt

在最初三年的资助中，研究组的六个初步子项目调查了以下问题：（1）哪些叙事形式和技巧是流行系列的特征（“叙事”）？(2)与其他文化领域（“区别”）相比，在流行文化领域，特别是系列叙事鼓励或发起了哪些演员角色和接受行为？(3)哪些文化历史条件是大众系列（“历史”）所要求或促进的？在叙述的层面上，递归性的过程--也就是说，对已经叙述的内容不断地重新调整可能的延续--被证明是大众连载的关键。因此，很明显，流行系列的叙事学方法必须系统地与演员导向和文化阐释学的观点相关联，以便充分描述正在进行的叙事和正在进行的接受之间的多方面的，历史上具体的，叙事上重要的反馈回路。与此同时，在区分的层面上，许多文化研究方法中所设定的生产（通常被视为限制性或操纵性的）与接受（通常被视为解放性或抵抗性的）之间的规范性对立，不足以解释流行系列中文本与副文本或专业与业余实践之间的高度渗透性。与此同时，布迪厄之后的场域理论假说也只是部分地得到了材料的证实;我们的民族志子项目发掘出了一个关于流行系列的使用和享受的更具活力的光谱。因此，根据行动者网络模型来思考流行系列实践是有帮助的。按照这种模式，流行系列可以被理解为自我能动的文化媒介（在拉图尔的意义上），不仅包括行动的人和机构，而且还包括行动的形式，对象和媒体。因此，在历史层面上，文化生态视角的重要性脱颖而出，即一种分析自19世纪以来流行系列的发展的方法，作为商业和典型的合作叙事格式，与其媒体技术和制度环境的不断发展的“启示”相关。根据这些考虑，为第二个供资期制定了九个分项目;这些分项目旨在提供（1）坚实的历史基础，（2）概念巩固，（3）扩大调查对象的领域。三个子项目致力于系列流行文化在德国和美国的早期历史，具体而言：时代之前，内战时，一个新的商业美国流行文化开始存在（系列城市的奥秘）;世纪后半期在德国与其相应的，但文化的具体发展（德语期刊）;以及世纪初，当这种结构巩固自己的看法和描述的一个新的技术“大众文化”（早期美国电影连续剧）。三个子项目继续流行的序列的区别（作者的系列作为一种职业），进化（翻拍为回顾序列）和叙事（时空结构的串行世界）的分析;这些子项目的目的明确深化和细化的概念发现的第一个项目阶段。三个子项目的方法，以缩小现有研究的差距，新的对象：他们专注于文化的变异性和流行的连续剧在其最富有成效的当代市场之一（音乐在印度电视连续剧）的全球化层面，在二十一世纪（电脑游戏）的数字连续剧的特殊性，并在非虚构的流行连续剧（电视真人秀）的格式。

During its first three years of funding, the Research Unit’s six initial subprojects investigated the following questions: (1) Which narrative forms and techniques are characteristic for popular series ("narration")? (2) Which actor-roles and acts of reception are encouraged or initiated by serial narratives specifically in the realm of popular culture, in contrast to other cultural fields ("distinction")? (3) Which cultural-historical conditions are required or promoted by popular series ("history")? At the level of narration, processes of recursivity – that is, the continual readjustment of possible continuations with respect to what has already been narrated – proved to be essential to popular seriality. As a result, it became clear that narratological approaches to popular series must be systematically correlated with actor-oriented and culturalhermeneutic perspectives, in order to adequately describe the multifaceted, historically specific, and narratively significant feedback loops between ongoing narration and ongoing reception. At the same time, it became apparent at the level of distinction that the oftentimes normative opposition, posited in many cultural studies approaches, between production (usually seen as restrictive or manipulative) and reception (usually seen as emancipatory or resistant) insufficiently accounts for the high degree of permeability that can be found in popular series between textual and paratextual or between professional and amateur practices. Concomitantly, field-theoretical hypotheses, following Bourdieu, were only partially confirmed by the material; our ethnographic subprojects unearthed a more dynamic spectrum with regard to the uses and enjoyments of popular series. Thus, it proved helpful to think of popular-serial practice according to the model of an actornetwork. Following this model, popular series can be understood as self-dynamic cultural agents (in Latour's sense), comprised not only of acting persons and institutions but also of action-conducting forms, objects, and media. Consequently, at the level of history, the significance of a cultural-ecological perspective came to the fore, i.e. an approach that analyzes the development, since the nineteenth century, of popular series as commercial and typically collaborative narrative formats in correlation with the evolving "affordances" of their media-technological and institutional environments. In accordance with these considerations, nine subprojects have been developed for a second funding period; these subprojects aim to provide (1) a firm historical grounding, (2) a conceptual consolidation, and (3) an expansion of the field of objects under investigation. Three subprojects are devoted to the early history of serial popular culture in Germany and the United States, specifically: the era prior to the Civil War when a newly commercial American popular culture came into existence (serial city mysteries); the latter half of the nineteenth century in Germany with its corresponding but culturally specific developments (German-language periodicals); and the early twentieth century, when such structures consolidated themselves in the perceptions and descriptions of a new technological "mass culture" (early American film serials). Three subprojects continue the analyses of popular serial distinction (the authorship of series as a profession), evolution (remaking as retrospective serialization), and narration (the spatiotemporal architecture of serial worlds); these subprojects aim explicitly to deepen and refine the conceptual findings of the first project phase. Three subprojects approach new objects with a view to closing gaps in existing research: They focus on the cultural variability and globalized dimension of popular seriality in one of its most productive contemporary markets (music in Indian television series), on the specificity of digital seriality in the twenty-first century (computer games), and on non-fictional formats of popular seriality (reality TV).