MLA 2016 Talk: Seriality and Sound

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Serial Season 2 has recently premiered, after a long wait from fans who listened rapt through Sarah Koenig's first season last fall. This time, Koenig follows the story of Bowe Bergdahl. Last season, Koenig recovered the story of Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore in 1999. The Serial podcast narrated Syed's murder case over 12 (approximately) weekly installments.

The Serial podcast was a break-out hit, establishing a faithful following that chronicled the podcast's every development and speculated about the 15 year old case on Reddit.

In a paper that I will soon deliver at MLA 2016 and that may appear in an edited collection on the Serial podcast, I argue that the serialization of true crime, as in the case of the Serial podcast, tends to produce obsessive responses in dedicated audience members. While I am sure that fans of Serial are well aware of the non-fictional status of Adnan Syed's murder case, they react to the serialized narration of it in such a way that it seems immediate and vital. While part of Koenig's purpose is to question whether justice was served in Syed's conviction--and thus, there is an immediate and important purpose to her narrating a case that occurred 15 years ago--some audience members became so enmeshed in the story that they sought out information about witnesses and victims in the case. For these people, the crime had occurred over a decade ago; yet, serialization brought the case roaring back to life. Indeed, fans have harassed witnesses, such as Jay Wilds.

The reception of Serial the podcast elucidates the power of serial form itself, a power that was amply demonstrated in the Victorian period. Sarah Koenig is not the first to serialize true crime--Victorian newspapers serialized the true crimes too. Journalism quickly bled over into fiction, as broadsides, novelizations, plays, and illustrations speculated and re-imagined the crime for a rapt Victorian audience. Victorians routinely attended executions and traipsed through crime scenes, taking tokens home as souvenirs. We might consider the Victorians macabre, but are we really that different from them?

I present my paper on the Serial podcast, "The Ethics of Serial Form: Distinguishing Fiction from Reality in NPR’s Serial," at the Seriality and Sound panel at the MLA Convention on January 8 at 8:30am in room 407 at the JW Marriott.

As this spoof on Serial demonstrates, parodies condense genre.