Transgressive Seriality: Netflix, the Victorian Novel, and Student Novellas in the 2020 Classroom

[...]my learning outcomes bridged book history and digital humanities: in an earlier class, students read Vanity Fair (1847–48) by installments and blogged about essays and advertisements they found in journals from corresponding months of the 1840s. The class studies H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Stranger Things (2016–) to discuss linear and circular form, the rise of science fiction, and the potentialities of narrative to give shape to nascent science such as evolution and string theory. [...]the assignment I designed was less about making Victorian literature relevant than about perpetuating the dynamic potential of serialization. The one constraint was logistical, imposed for printing purposes: that students make a page spread in Word and email that file to me and Sarah Smith,(3) the Program Manager of Dartmouth’s Book Arts Workshop (see Appendix 2).