The Rhetoric of Serials at the Present Time

Abstract

The rhetoric of serials promotes invisibility, timelessness, and order, and prevents us from being able to think what we might want from serial publications, or whether we want serials at all. Serial rhetoric makes us cling to our ideas of what serials publishing should be and think of any publishing in terms of traditional print paradigms. These limitations corroborate, on the one hand, a fin-de-siecle rhetoric associated with electronic text (discussed in the essay), and tie in on the other with the publishing world's attempts to think of new ventures in term of established practices. Postmodern Culture has offered new models for pricing serials which attempt to rethink what we want from published work. These have not met with success partly because of another rhetoric, that of experimental media. This rhetoric is in some ways like the rhetoric of serials, so that when the two combine they doubly screen us from our alternatives. This essay explicates the paradigms that govern our perception of serials a...