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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D Thesis Abstract - The Forms of Characters. Typologies, Morphologies and Relational Systems in Contemporary TV Serial Narrations
Text.Serial.Journal
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Projects & Abstracts
2019-03-01
2021-09-02
2019-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Sara Casoli
2019/03/01
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna
2036-461X
32
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Ph.D Thesis Abstract - The Forms of Characters. Typologies, Morphologies and Relational Systems in Contemporary TV Serial Narrations
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16208/16673
19
The forms of characters. Typologies, morphologies and
relational systems in contemporary TV serial narrations
Sara Casoli / Ph.D Thesis Abstract1
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna




   Fictional characters have demonstrated to be ubiquitous and proteian entities,
and it’s because of the semantic slipperiness of their essence that the importance
and pivotal role of these narrative elements have been neglected for a long
time. Even when taken into consideration and observed through the lens of
this or that approach – from Aristotle to Romanticism, from Structuralism to
Postmodernism, from Cognitive Theory to Narratologies, and so on – characters
still remain a theoretical challenge and a knotty object of study2 built on the
balance of two faces, a textual construction expressed by a medium, and a
“quasi-persona” existing in a diegetic space.
   The vagueness of the concept concerns characters in every media product, and
serial TV narratives are no exception. Nevertheless, in an era dominated by the
aesthetic and productive paradigm of “complex television”,3 where characters fulfil
a substantial role in shaping the aesthetic layout of contemporary TV series and
influencing audience participation, we have to reflect upon them. The aim of this
work is to investigate characters in contemporary drama TV series produced in
the USA, with the purpose of unearthing their features and specificities, as well
as proposing a typology of their manifestations. In order to achieve this goal, we
will rely on a methodology that merges TV and Media Studies with Narratology.
In fact, in the plethora of different attitudes through which it is possible to analyse
fictional beings, Post-Classical Narratology appears to be a fruitful way in order
to outline those processes that generate the identity of serial characters and their
characterization. In this perspective, thanks to the momentum given by the latest
contributions in Narratology4 – which takes into account cultures and societies, as
well as textual and aesthetic structures – it is possible to conceive characters as both

1
   Ph.D. Thesis supervised by Professor Monica Dall’Asta defended on 18 March 2019. For
information: sara.casoli2@unibo.it
2
  Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis and Ralph Schneider, Characters in Fictional Worlds. Understanding
Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media (New York and London: De Gruyter, 2010).
3
  Jason Mittell, Complex TV. The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: New
York University Press, 2010).
4
  Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. by David Herman (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1999); Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, ed. by Jan Alber,
Monika Fludernick (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010).

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                         Sara Casoli


textual constructions with certain features (mediality, textuality, narrative strategies,
etc.) and contextual figures, namely considering how these fictional beings act, react
and behave in the storyworld. Bearing in mind this intrinsic duplicity, a suitable
methodology that takes both sides into account, offering a theoretical toolkit
through which we examine TV series characters and their textual and contextual
(aka cultural) components, is provided by a particular branch of Post-Classical
Narratology: the Neo-Formalism.5 This approach considers as a “form” every
arrangement of elements, regardless of the fact that there are textual strategies,
such as narrative and figurative features, aesthetic strategies and the medium, or
contextual strategies, by which we mean socio-cultural themes and issues.
   We propose to examine characters in contemporary TV serial narratives as they
were composed, or better, co-formed by different forms, both textual and socio-
cultural ones, clashing with one another. To put it in other terms, we consider
these characters as battlefields, where many different textual and socio-cultural
forms come into contact and collide, shaping the identity of these fictional beings
on the textual level and their appearance on the diegetic one. The benefit of
such approach relies on the possibility of decomposing these figures into their
components and forms, observing the specifities beneath the conformation of
their identity and the process of characterization.
   Conducting a neo-formalist analysis on contemporary TV serial characters
means taking into account two distinct but interconnected generative factors
of serial characters identity and characterization. On the one hand, there is
morphology, which implies those elements that “internally” affect the construction
of characters, from the point of view of the aesthetic materials and that of
the cultural functions. Basically, the identity of a character can be considered
morphologically simple, with a stable kernel of traits repeated in every instalment,
or complex, with some variations operating on the identity of the character. On
the other hand, there is the relationship system, which involves the placement of
the character in a narrative world with specific characteristics (type of seriality,
transmediality, intertextuality, transtextuality,6 etc.) and the network it creates
with other fictional beings. Here again, the relational system can be simple, with
one or few characters stably performing the role of protagonist(s) and existing
in tendentially closed narratives, or it can be complex, where the plenitude of
interconnected storylines, even not necessarily belonging to the same series or to
same narrative world, produces a turnover of different protagonists. Looking at
the many characters we can experience in nowadays TV serial narratives within
the neo-formalist framework, and considering their morphology and relational
system, it is possible to detect some “family resemblances”7 between them, i.e.


5
  Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015).
6
  Richard Saint-Gelais, Fictions transfuges (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 2011).
7
  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2001).

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similar morphological assets and analogous ways to create relations with the
narrative space and its cast of characters. When tracking these similarities, we
group peculiar manifestations of serial characters into categories, thus creating a
typology. Practically speaking, by crossing the two generative factors discussed
above, in light of both their simplicity or complexity, we get four types of serial
characters: the stereotypical character (both morphology and relational systems
are simple), the individualized character (complex morphology and simple
relational system), the popular character (simple morphology and complex
relational system) and the replicating character (both the morphology and
relational systems are complex).
   Through this typology and the examination of the types composing it,
we propose a “distant reading”8 on serial characters. This view allows us to
radiograph the ways they come into existence in the contemporary televisual
scenario, and to consider the complexity and the manifold nature of these
narrative elements as a general theoretical problem, instead of focalizing the
analytical efforts on particular case studies.




8
  Franco Moretti, La letteratura vista da lontano (Torino: Einaudi, 2003) and Distant Reading
(London and New York: Verso Books, 2013).

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