Světy na pokračování: Rozbor možností seriálového vyprávění

The book aims to effectively describe, explore and explain serial fiction. Provided approach – serial fiction poetics – aims to (1) present a systemic explanation of serial fiction, (2) capture variability of artistic possibilities of serial narrative, and (3) offer tools for the analysis of actual serial works. Its concept of seriality serves as a foundation for the first and second aims; it remains as mere background for analytical hypotheses with regard to the third aim. Serial fiction poetics assumes the presence of a space-time continuum, which is created by the work through interaction with its audience. This is process is termed a fictional macroworld: narrated stories take place within its conditions and settings. Each episode of a serial constitutes an episodic world; seriality denotes a relationship between the state of affairs in a macroworld at the end of a current episode and the state of affairs in the macroworld at the end of the previous one. Depending on the intensity of connectedness between these two states and the relations of fictional characters to them, the book presents a typology of seriality, which serves as a functional and heuristic categorization, yet not as a substantive one: a separate, a non-sequential, a semisequential, a sequential, a disrupted. The book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book gives a systemic explanation of seriality, using the five types top-down. The second part of the book explores variable possibilities of serial narrative. The third part of the book attempt to offer the greatest possible degree of aesthetic sensitivity towards those works analysed and those explanations presented. The three parts develop and transform, with respect to these three aims, which differ from each other but are also interrelated, only to answer the questions posed, in correspondence with the individual dimensions of serial fiction poetics, in ways that are at the same time systematic and aesthetically sensitive.