Of television series, intensities and postmodern fears

Abstract

Attentive to the way that the affects colonize the cultural forms, the narrative theory developed by Fredric Jameson contains keys of interest to question how fear, in recent times, emerges as an intensity: a subjective commotion that transcends the possibility of being communicated, but which leaves traces in the artistic materialities. The aim of this work is to reveal to the scope of this category, in light of a set of TV series that make fear and its critical states a place of enunciation. The perspective of Jameson allows certain degree of generalization through the acknowledgement of procedures of representation, such as the episodic experiences of the characters, the preponderance of the intimate spaces, and the effects of strangeness that pierce through some dominant generic matrixes. The objective is to start a coherent regularization of current series that dramatize the overflow of fear in the social body, and, at the same time, signal systemic changes introduced by the cultural experience of postmodernity.