Synchronic Reading

ABSTRACT:This essay intervenes in the largely diachronic assumptions of seriality studies by proposing a method called “synchronic reading,” in which readers might consume parts of different texts at the same time. While synchronic reading was an historical practice for Victorians, as a contemporary method it has historiographic and literary/interpretive implications. Historically, the essay attempts, with the usual caveats, to reconstruct what a Victorian reader might have done in, say, January of 1860 when parts of various serialized novels came out in temporal proximity to each other although with different rhythms of publication. The historiographic aspects of the method allow us to think about the differences between diachronic and synchronic axes of histories in terms of scale, accessibility, and relation to geography. On the level of literary analysis, synchronic reading allows us to think of texts, and particularly the Victorian novel, in different ways—not as finished wholes or even as accretive parts moving inexorably toward an ending, but as fragments of texts in conversation with other texts in an extended narrative middle. The article takes up all these issues through three thought experiments that emphasize the differences synchronic reading might make in understanding character types, lexicon, and genre.