Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial Television

This book posits an interconnection between the ways in which contemporary television serials cue cognitive operations, solicit emotional responses, and elicit aesthetic appreciation. The chapters explore a number of questions including: How do the particularities of form and style in contemporary serial television engage us cognitively, emotionally, and aesthetically? How do they foster cognitive and emotional effects such as feeling suspense, anticipation, surprise, satisfaction, and disappointment? Why and how do we value some serials while disliking others? What is it about the particularities of serial television form and style, in conjunction with our common cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic capacities, that accounts for serial television’s cognitive, socio-political, and aesthetic value and its current ubiquity in popular culture? This book will appeal to postgraduates and scholars working in television studies as well as film studies, cognitive media theory, media psychology, and the philosophy of art.

1. Introduction: Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial TelevisionTed Nannicelli and Héctor J. Pérez Part 1. The Nature of Contemporary Televisual Seriality 2. Television’s Temporality: Seriality and Temporal ProlongationAlberto Nahum García and Ted Nannicelli 3. Multi-plot Structure in Television SerialsHéctor J. Pérez and María Jesús Ortiz 4. “Oh My God, They Didn’t Kill Kenny”: Seriality and Viewer Engagement in Contemporary Animated TelevisionOliver Kroener 5. Seriality and Expressiveness in Mad MenElliott Logan Part 2. Audiences 6. From Shots to Storyworlds: The Cognitive Processes Supporting the Comprehension of Serialized TelevisionJeffrey E. Saerys-Foy and Joseph Magliano 7. Beliefs, Desires, and Emotions: A Theory of Emotions and Some Implications for the Understanding of Viewer Reactions to TV SerialsRainer Reisenzein Part 3. Poetics 8. Reaching through Time: On Seriality, Temporality, and TwofoldnessMurray Smith 9. Five Theses on the Difficulty of Ending Quality TV SeriesMargrethe Bruun Vaage 10. Pop Music in Television Serials: Priming, Authorial Commentary, and Musical MemoryBirger Langkjaer 11. Twin Peaks and the Performative Poetics of Complex Television Aaron Taylor 12. Parallelism and Complex Storytelling in Film and TVMalcolm Turvey Part 4. Value: Aesthetic and Beyond 13. Audiovisual Atmospheres, Moods, and Metaphoric Spaces: Aesthetically Rich Spaces in Complex TV SeriesKathrin Fahlenbrach 14. Repetition, Familiarity, and Aesthetic Pleasure: Formulaic Generic Television Series Iris Vidmar Jovanovic 15. Ethics and Bad Protagonists in Serial Television DramaCarl Plantinga 16. A Sense of Moment: Appreciating Television Serials from Aesthetic and Cognitive PerspectivesSarah Cardwell

Ted Nannicelli is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at The University of Queensland. He is editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (2014), and author of Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective. Héctor J. Pérez is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Narrative at the Universitat Politècnica de València. He has published widely in scientific journals such as Projections, Culture & Psychology,Aisthesis, and L’Atalante. He is editor of SERIES, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.