Zentralprojekt

在前三年的资助中，研究股的六个初始子项目调查了以下问题：(1)哪些叙事形式和技术是流行电视剧（“叙事”）的特征？(2)与其他文化领域相比，哪些演员角色和接受行为是由流行文化领域的系列叙事所鼓励或发起的（“区别”）？(3)流行系列（“历史”）需要或促进哪些文化历史条件？在叙述的层面上，递归的过程——也就是说，对已经叙述的可能的延续进行不断的重新调整——被证明对流行的连续性是必不可少的。因此，很明显，流行电视剧的叙事学方法必须与演员导向和文化解释学观点系统地联系起来，以便充分描述正在进行的叙述和正在进行的接受之间的多方面、历史特定的和叙事学上重要的反馈循环。与此同时，在区分的层面上，很明显，在许多文化研究方法中，生产（通常被视为限制性或操纵性）和接受（通常被视为解放性或抵抗性）之间经常存在的规范性对立，不足以解释在文本和副文本之间或专业和业余实践之间的流行系列中可以找到的高度渗透性。与此同时，布迪厄之后的场论假设也只是部分地被材料所证实；我们的人种学子项目发掘了一个关于流行系列的使用和享受的更动态的光谱。因此，根据演员网络模型来思考流行系列实践是有帮助的。按照这个模型，流行系列可以被理解为自我动态的文化代理人（在拉图尔的意义上），它不仅包括行动者和机构，还包括行为引导形式、对象和媒体。因此，在历史层面上，文化生态视角的重要性凸显出来，即一种分析自19世纪以来流行电视剧作为商业和典型合作叙事格式的发展的方法，与媒体技术和制度环境的不断发展的“可视性”相关。根据这些考虑，已为第二个筹资期拟订了九个次级项目；这些子项目旨在提供(1)坚实的历史基础，(2)概念巩固，(3)扩展研究对象的领域。三个子项目致力于德国和美国的早期流行文化历史，具体来说：内战之前，一种新的商业美国流行文化开始存在的时代（连环城市之谜）；19世纪下半叶的德国及其相应但具有文化特殊性的发展（德语期刊）；二十世纪初，这种结构在对新技术“大众文化”的感知和描述中巩固了自己（早期的美国电影连续剧）。三个子项目继续分析流行的系列区分（作为职业的系列作者），进化（作为回顾性系列的重塑）和叙事（系列世界的时空架构）；这些子项目明确地旨在深化和完善第一个项目阶段的概念发现。三个子项目处理新对象，以期缩小现有研究中的差距：它们关注其最具生产力的当代市场之一（印度电视连续剧中的音乐）的流行系列性的文化变异性和全球化维度，关注二十一世纪数字系列性的特殊性（电脑游戏），以及流行系列性的非虚构形式（真人秀电视）。

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).