Seriation of modern popular literature as a factor of "shaping the reader"
Texts of modern literature exist not only as inherent artistic systems, but also as material objects involved in the scenarios of a consumer society. Perception of the text is always complicated by the extra-artistic facts of its existence. A special zone between textual and non-textual realities is formed by the paratext, which is an information complex framing a literary text. Among all the elements of the paratext this paper considers seriation. Under the series following V.Ye. Kozlov the author understands "texts of various authors with no common plot united <by the publisher> by genre, ideology and format parameters." In case of mass literature (paraliterature) "series" is equivalent to the marketing concept of the brand. Most often a series is classified by a genre or sub-genre basis. The relations of the reader and the text are not aesthetic, and expectations should match the gained experience. The situation is different in high-quality literature. Belonging to the field of literature, the text tends toward the pole of exclusivity while claiming market success thus discrediting its artistic value. In this case, publishers have the mission of a "double agent." On the one hand, they select texts for the series, ensuring "quality product," on the other, they save the anti-hierarchy, the exclusivity of the text. Seriation affects the formation of expectations from the text, and the text representing the aesthetic position of the publisher, forms the connotative background of the series. As a rule, the series has one or more "nuclear" texts. The industry of mass literature builds trust in the brand (the series), building a strong "nucleus" that allows periphery. The regularity of the semiotic basis of paratext elements repeatability ("seriation") affects both the reader's expectations and the interpretation vector. Interpretive and critical discourse, which, together with seriation, is defined by other paratext elements, seems only to fix the value of a work of art, but is actually involved in its production. Recognizing the phenomenon of seriation as a contemporary cultural practice, we can see a trend to simplify communication schemes via greater convergence of the reader's expectations and gained experiences without losing the aesthetic sensation. Seriation and serialization correlate with such general processes as globalization and rapid consumption.