Fiction, Series, and Creativity: a Conversation

Abstract

The article presents an edited transcription of a scholarly dialogue held on March 9, 2026, at the Campus de Gandía of the Universitat Politècnica de València, within the research project "Aesthetics, Cognition, and Social Impact of Contemporary Series" (CIAICO/2024). The conversation brings together philosophers José Luis Villacañas Berlanga and Antonio Rivera García in a wide-ranging discussion on the cultural, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic dimensions of contemporary serialized fiction. Starting from the thesis that television series represent the narrative perfection of cinema — rather than its degradation — the dialogue explores the role of series as a modern form of ethical and temporal pedagogy, heir to the nineteenth-century novel. Key themes include the opposition between narration and monstration in film history, the legacy of the avant-gardes and the high/low culture divide, the Freudian concepts of the ego ideal and narcissism as frameworks for understanding the evolution from the heroic characters of classical cinema to the more human protagonists of contemporary series, and the political implications of identification as theorized by Laclau. The conversation also addresses the problem of explicitness in Spanish fiction, the neuroscientific theory of narrative simulation (Oatley), and the family as the fundamental institution of human experience. Together, these threads articulate a defense of the creative, emancipatory potential of serialized fiction when it treats the viewer as an active, adult subject.