Serialism: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Anthropocene in Contemporary Literature

In this thesis, I explore the politics of the serial form as utilised by contemporary women writers through a specific focus on authors Valeria Luiselli, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and Ali Smith. While these writers have amassed significant audiences, awards, and readerly communities, surprisingly little has been written on the serial nature of their work. Building on the work of Caroline Levine (2015), I deploy a political formalism which seeks to map social, literary, and ecological structures onto one another through an examination of the politics and structural aesthetics of the serial form. I reorient Levine’s work towards a specifically feminist formalist mode that highlights the politico-aesthetic structures these series write against, charting the centrality of women’s affective experience within this pluralistic and commercial form. I examine the archival poetics of the series, arguing that these series create archives of their own to protect against the failure of cultural memory. The constraining nature of hierarchies are explored within the texts of study, and the paradoxical creation of a productive pluralism through this fragmented, repetitious, and commercial form is engendered. I argue that the capacious time and space of the series warrants the use of a term borrowed from musical scholarship, ‘the serialism’, to examine both the constitutive structures of the serial form, and its organizing principle. I argue that through use of the structures of the serialism—fragment, repetition, duration, gap, polyphony, and collectives—these writers create theories and philosophies of their own about the intersections between art, nature, politics, and the social world. The importance of reader engagement, and the emphasis placed on interpretation, enable these serialisms to construct a supportive and potentially liberating network and space—a serial collective that is constructed both against and by the hierarchies it seeks to resist.