The Bureau and the Realism of Spy Fiction

This article addresses the issue of realism in relationship to contemporary serial fiction. Drawing on The Bureau (Canal+, 2015–2020), it argues that spy TV series are “realistic” not because they correspond to reality but because of their impact on reality. It begins by giving an overview of the many ways in which “realism,” in the ordinary sense of a resemblance with reality, served as the working framework for The Bureau’s team. It then identifies three distinct types of realisms in the series. The first is a “fictional realism,” namely the ability of The Bureau to conform to the aesthetic and narrative conventions of realistic fictions. The second type of realism, which I qualify as “ordinary,” refers to the possibilities offered by the show’s aesthetics and the enmeshment of The Bureau with viewers’ ordinary experience. The third type of “performative realism” refers to the series’ impact on shared representations and reality. By providing a common language about the secret activities of the state, The Bureau has gone from being a framed version of reality to being one of the defining frameworks through which state secrecy is experienced both individually and collectively, by insiders and the public at large.

Ursula Ganz-Blättler. “Signs of time: Cumulative narrative in broadcast television fiction”

TV series are one of the very few ‘traditional’ media formats that continue to thrive in the current media landscape. In Europe, the format of TV series (i.e. serial audio-visual fictional narratives) has been surging for some time in terms of numbers of suppliers and consumers, as well as in shares of distributors’ offerings and consumers’ media use. Homegrown high-end original productions have become ‘calling cards’ for suppliers active in the European market(s). Subscription-based, pay-per-view, and advertising-based networks, as well as public service suppliers order and finance serial fiction. International players like Netflix, HBO, Sky, and Amazon invest in original (co-) productions in many countries. From a media economic perspective, the market entry of more and more ‘big tech’ and conglomerate players into the production and distribution of TV series is another indicator of the importance of the product TV series. The success of the format warrants extensive investigation. Nevertheless, compared to, e.g., cinema, ‘new’ media, and political communication, the attention of scholars in communication/media science and other disciplines still seems surprisingly modest, particularly in Europe. Some noteworthy European works on fictional TV series are Schlütz (2016), Redvall (2013), Gormász (2015), and the scientific journal Series – International Journal of TV Serial Narratives (series.unibo.it). Ursula Ganz’s work Signs of Time was accepted as a habilitation thesis in 2009, and an adapted form was published in 2018. The thesis thus represents somewhat of a European premiere in discussing in great detail and depth what the term ‘(audiovisual) cumulative narrative’ entails and how the central feature of accumulation impacts the analysis of narrative as communication and reflective stance.

Unquiet on the Home Front: Scottish Popular Fiction and the Truth of War

This chapter focuses on the popular writing of the war, from the serial fiction of popular newspapers to the volumes of wartime non-fiction and fiction of Scottish writers such as Patrick MacGill, Ian Hay, Boyd Cable, and R. W. Campbell. The chapter will attempt to qualify the notion that popular war writing helped effect a separation between soldiers and civilians through its tendency to glamourise and sanitise war scenes and describe them in euphemistic terms. This chapter will argue there was, in fact, a considerable amount of realism and violence in popular war writing.

‘These Acres of Print’: Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern

While Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers enable readers to imagine national community, Charles Dickens’s writings are attentive to the varying ways that the newspaper press might shape, inhibit, or fragment community through its uncontrolled production of miscellaneous content and matter. This first chapter shows the growing distinction that Dickens drew between fiction and nonfiction, novel and newspaper, in his communal visions for serial publication. Early Dickens characterised the newspaper press as a meteorological force of destruction, a thunderstorm threatening to engulf the city of London, yet continually produced to meet the endless public appetite for more news. Over the course of his career, Dickens experimented with other metaphors for the working of serial narrative and its influence on a reading public. From an intangible creature telling stories to a weaver at his loom, Dickens encourages readers to see the instance of a particular serial output linked to its larger structure over time. In doing so, he privileges the power of serial fiction to cultivate new ways of envisioning community.