Hannibal Lecter

A speculative examination of some manifestations of contemporary Horror through the lens of the Zombie; this article considers the relationship between Zombie Apocalypses, Zombies as agents (or not), and wider aspects of genre and theory including comic books and graphic novels, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.   

It surveys multimedia interest in zombies, mash-up novels, alternate universes, and the meetings of zombies with a range of other tropes in diverse narratives.

Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

This paper will explore the aesthetic strategies of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (NBC, 2013-15) in the context of film-philosophy and what appears as a sort of methodological Cartesian dualism – which is to say, approaches that posit film as mind and/or film as body – in order to suggest the possibilities for (re)introducing psychoanalytic theory into such psyche-soma-screen debates. Identifying a recurring stylistic motif throughout the series – which I will designate the “shudder-image” – I will ask whether established models such as Frampton’s (2006) concept of “filmind”, on the one hand, or Sobchack’s (1992) encounter with perceiving bodies, on the other, are sufficient for understanding the audio-visual techniques of Hannibal, and what scope there might be to bring notions such as “unconscious” and “symptom” into this conversation.  Where Adorno (1970) famously described the “shudder” provoked by the work of art, I will consider what is at stake when it is the image itself that convulses. This analysis will be framed in terms of the mind-body relation expressed in psychoanalysis, and developed with reference to Freud’s (1900) emphasis on the priority of form in the interpretation of dreams and Žižek’s (2019) dialectical understanding of the relationship between style and story. In short, in dialogue with phenomenology and affect theory, I ask: What contribution can Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis make to the study of aesthetics in general and Hannibal in particular?

It has often been said that we are living in a golden age of television, and much of the programming we consider superior is often rooted in or infl uenced heavily by literature. Additionally, as quality programming has flourished, the line between what we conceive of as literature and what we conceive of as television has blurred and become diaphanous. This particular liminality is exemplified throughout Bryan Fuller's Hannibal (2013-2015). Unlike the prestige television offerings of HBO and other cable network platforms, Hannibal, which appeared on NBC, was a network TV show, and its well-developed aesthetic often pushed the boundaries of network censorship.

Este capítulo pretende analizar las características esenciales de la narrativa televisiva contemporánea para compararlas con las del largometraje cinematográfico tradicional. En consecuencia, explicaremos en primer lugar las diferencias que la ficción televisiva y fílmica tienen en cuanto a unidad narrativa y progresión dramática: la duración textual, el tiempo de consumo y la combinación de la “anthology plot” y la “running plot”. En segundo lugar, examinaremos los conceptos de adaptación y remake, en los que tanto la memoria como la originalidad juegan un papel crucial para el éxito de cualquier derivación diegética. Tras aclarar el marco teórico, aplicaremos la teoría al análisis de dos series de televisión recientes basadas en largometrajes de éxito: la primera temporada de Fargo (FX, 2014-), una suerte de remake-secuela de la película de los hermanos Coen del año 1995; y las tres de Hannibal (NBC, 2013-15), un reboot de la franquicia de El silencio de los corderos (The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme, 1991) que intenta llenar los huecos previos al nacimiento del personaje en la novela El dragón rojo, de Thomas Harris.

Will Graham, one of the dual protagonists of NBC's Hannibal, should be turning into a werewolf. He is losing track of time, suddenly finding himself in places he doesn't remember going. He worries that he may be hurting or killing others while trapped in these fugue states. He senses things others do not, and has visions of blood, bodies, and prey animals. His body is undergoing unexplained physiological changes such as headaches and an elevated body temperature. He fears what he is becoming, even as his concerns are brushed off by those around him. This narrative of body horror and transformation is familiar to viewers of popular shows such as Supernatural or Teen Wolf, in addition to countless other works in a popular culture now saturated with paranormal offerings. However, Will Graham is not, in fact, actually becoming a werewolf, because unlike shows which use the supernatural as a metaphor for other forms of transformation, Hannibal uses it as a simile.

This paper will explore the ways in which Hannibal relies on the audience’s familiarity with the language and tropes of supernatural narrative, most specifically that of the werewolf, to communicate the horror of its all too human serial killers.

In the thesis "The Monstrous Other in Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter Novels and Their Film Adaptations", the author analyzes how the monstrosity of Dr. Hannibal Lecter manifests itself, juxtaposing his character with other foreground moral monsters depicted in Thomas Harris' works and films based on them.

The basis for the first chapter is Monstruarium by Anna Wieczorkiewicz. This work explains the term "monstrosity" throughout history and the direction of changes that took place in teratology including in its research area both the deformed human bodies, animals with duplicated limbs, fantastic monsters as well as the reactions they caused in human beings.

In the second chapter, Thomas Harris' novels and their film adaptations are analysed in order to determine what did Dr. Hannibal Lecter's monstrosity consist of, to describe its cause, symbolism and place that the character of the cannibalistic doctor takes in culture.

Next, the character of Vladis Grutas, the leader of a group of Hilfswillige who helped Nazi Forces during the Second World War is introduced. Grutas along with his companions commits an act of active starvation cannibalism by killing and eating Hannibal’s younger sister – Mischa and perpetrates other criminal acts.

In Chapter Four, the character of Francis Dolarhyde, also known as “The Tooth Fairy” or “Red Dragon” is discussed. Dolarhyde is a character in whom moral and physical monstrosity overlap. Born with cleft palate and flat nose, Francis, who throughout his entire life experiences abuse both at the hands of his peers and his grandmother falls into psychosis and desires to become the dragon from the painting by William Blake, by committing acts of murder on families, being his vengeance on and directed at the mother figure.

The character described in the fifth chapter is Jame Gumb, also known as “Buffalo Bill”. Gumb is a serial killer, killing women in order to bereave them of their skin and to use it to create his own quasi-transsexual suit, who, similarly to Dolarhyde, fell in the past victim to unhappy childhood and suffered due to the strict norms imposed by the society.

In the last – sixth chapter of the thesis, the character of the disfigured pedophile Mason Verger, who wants to take revenge on Lecter, guilty of his permanent physical disfiguration, is introduced. Verger is the character in whose case moral and physical monstrosity overlaps to the greatest extent from all the monsters described in the thesis.

This thesis investigates how the taboo of cannibalism in Canada generated the myth of a creature called the Wendigo. The aim is to present the journey of the myth from oral stories told by the First Nations of the Canadian North to literature and modern media in both Canada and the United States of America. The first chapter introduces the terms needed to discuss the matter and gives a theoretical introduction to the further analysis. The second chapter focuses on the literary adaptations of the Wendigo. Firstly, it presents the legend of the Wendigo and the characteristic features of the creature. Later on, it analyzes the images of the Wendigo in short poems by Canadian and American poets. Afterwards the process is repeated based on two novels: "Three Day Road" by the Canadian writer Joseph Boyden and "Pet Sematary" by the American writer Stephen King.
The third chapter presents the images of the Wendigo in the modern media. The Canadian approach is examined on the basis of a horror film titled "Ghotskeeper" whereas the analysis of the American adaptation of the cannibalistic creature focuses on the first season of TV series "Hannibal".

This is a pre-publication draft of my piece on NBC's Hannibal. The full version -- with page numbers and an additional epilogue that addresses the cancellation of the show after its third season -- can be found in Däwes, Ganser, & Poppenhagen, _Transgressive Television. Politics and Crime in 21st Century American TV Series_, Heidelberg: Winter, 2015.

This paper explores how the television series Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015) conveys a deep aesthetic delectation, despite presenting numerous repulsive or uncomfortable scenes. The article analyzes how the very serial nature of TV fiction enables a specific way of negotiating the paradox of aversion through three textual strategies: a protracted character engagement, a suspense that articulates the aesthetic possibilities of “temporal prolongation”, and a beautiful mise-en-scène for abhorrent visual motives and actions. These three strategies generate an intense fascination in the spectator, allowing to subvert the features of the repugnant.

Works of art seem to be used more and more frequently in scripted TV shows nowadays. Most often, they constitute a symbolic point of reference, an intertextual “interlude,” or merely a convenient plot device. However, Bryan Fuller’s 2013 TV series Hannibal goes beyond the stereotypical functions of art, using it as a sort of intermediary between literary and televisual fantasies and elevating its narrative status. It can even be argued that works of art in Hannibal constitute the key element to understanding character development and transmutation in the three seasons of the show. This article focuses on the ramifications of making Sandro Botticelli’s ever-elusive Primavera a striking aspect of Hannibal’s third season. Fuller foregrounds the painting’s motif of becoming in order to repurpose the literary franchise and its cinematic offshoots. As a result, a more in-depth portrayal of its principal characters is offered, together with their unending, but ultimately incomplete alchemi...

This chapter considers the dialectic of desire and identification in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015). Taking as a point of departure Diane Fuss’ observation that Hannibal Lecter’s most famous cinematic outing, The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), is a film about “the horrors of identification”, I examine the relationship between Hannibal and his protégé, Will Graham, as the television series develops from baroquely staged police procedural to gay love story. This chapter suggests that the series replaces conventional male (Oedipal) socialisation with a transformative process of “Hannibalisation", a queering of wanting and being, in becoming Hannibal.

This is my graduation research. The research tackles anger in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and makes a special focus on Heathcliff. It tackles Heathcliff's  anger and the effects of that anger, the techniques used to show that anger such as symbolism, and supernatural elements, and the consequences of children abuse and class distinction as they must be fought in any community.

Executive producer and showrunner Bryan Fuller's most recent television series, Hannibal (2013-2015), reflects the ever-growing American obsession with food, nutrition, and consumption in media culture by turning food into horror. The series draws the viewer into the world of cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter by focusing on his preparation and presentation of elaborate meals. Hannibal, a psychiatrist by trade, is known for his culinary prowess, and the show foregrounds this talent with an emphasis on food preparation scenes modeled after television cooking programs. An MFA Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Maryland Institute College of Art in candidacy for the degree of Critical Studies (MFA).

In my essay “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives”, I assessed Hannibal as an example of how the detective genre was being reimagined in the twenty-first century.1 The series, I argued, challenged the normative detective figure in American crime genres and subverted norms of gender, sexuality, and disability implicit therein. The airing of the third season provides the occasion to reexamine the topic. The scene just discussed, and others in the third season, makes some of my arguments from the earlier article seem downright naïve. In that essay, I tried to carefully build a case for the “queer valences” of Lecter and Will’s relationship. These arguments became almost entirely unnecessary with the third season, in which the queer “subtexts” became more explicit. For example, Will confesses of Lecter in one scene from Season 3, “I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him” (3:3 "Secondo"). Lecter expresses his affection in less direct ways. He leaves for Will a “broken valentine”, a bloody body mangled to resemble a heart. Will calls it “a valentine written on a broken man” or Lecter’s “broken heart” (3:2 "Primavera"). At the same time, the relationship between the two men remained non-sexual, intensifying the tension in the series, which most interested me originally. The ambiguous nature of the men’s relationship, the tension between homosocial and homoerotic affection, is intensified, not collapsed, in the third season. This fact only increases the value the series offers in interrogating masculinity, sexuality, and homosociality. In this article, I will examine how the third season of Hannibal should serve as a clarion call to reexamine our existing notions of homosocial desire. The series uniquely imagines an intimate, passionate, and ambiguously erotic image of male friendship. The series demands a kind of analysis that many critical approaches, popular and scholarly alike, cannot provide, as so many of these approaches demand a binary framework of friendship-versus-gay- romance. Hannibal, particularly in its third season, asks us to imagine a conceptual space where “erotic” desire and passionate devotion can exist between male friends.

This talk deals with popular anti-heroic archetypes. It differs from previous research, because by exploring narrative structures of anti-heroic fiction, it shows that essential parallels exist in transgressive heroes of both East and West. This is important since in recent decades we register general decline of “moral perfectionism“ (term by Stanley Cavell) in popular fiction at the expense of morally ambiguous, violent, transgressive-but-enjoyable heroes. These characters are often honorable and “culturally permitted” despite their antisocial inclinations, extralegal violence, or motivation by vendetta (e.g. Robin Hood versus Nezumi Kōzō, or Al Pacino in Godfather versus Kitano Takeshi in Brother). Various culture-specific heroic archetypes are analyzed (cowboy, samurai, yakuza, gangster, social bandit) as they appear in popular mainstream narratives. I will further argue that rendering a certain violent/transgressive behavior as enjoyable is realized via three main narrative mechanisms: 1) positioning of the character, and the perspective from which a narrative is developed, 2) motivation of the character (i.e. set of adequate reasons he behaves as he does), and 3) charisma, appearance and aura of the character/actor.  Apart from offering an interdisciplinary methodological framework,  this research represents a significant departure from Friedrich Nietzsche (i.e. the dichotomy of Dionysian versus Apollonian ideal of conduct) in order to illuminate the fascination by heroes that are located beyond the conventional categories of good and evil.

KEYWORDS:
antihero theory, transgressive fiction, narratology, mediating violence, good versus evil, Nietzsche

Producer Bryan Fuller has commented that his aim--or one of his aims--in creating the Hannibal TV series is to create a sense of "collusion" between Hannibal and the viewer. This paper examines how Fuller accomplishes this end. I begin with elements within the actual narrative: point of view, character development, and aesthetic depictions of death. I move on to consider two external factors that contribute to the creation of this "collusion":  the existence of an existential vacuum in Western culture, the seeming disappearance of God, and the hypothetical existence of the demonic (Thus the title "Playing with Fire.")

In this article I address some of the practical consequences of adopting translation theory concepts within the field of adaptation studies. More specifically, I question the validity of the hypothesis that adaptation studies, allegedly a discipline in shambles, is in desperate need of a theoretical crossover with translation studies. While examining the claims made by, among others, Patrick Cattrysse, Lawrence Venuti and Hugo de Campos, and confronting them with the theories espoused by several cultural studies scholars, I intend to establish whether translation studies indeed deserves to be extolled as a major source inspiration for adaptation studies. Furthermore, the usefulness of such notions as the Polysystem Theory interpretants or transluciferation are tested against the complex case of novel-to-film adaptation, namely the 2013 TV series Hannibal, which is based on the widely acclaimed Thomas Harris literary franchise.

Serious crime is often aestheticized on television through the female (or feminized) body of the victim. Forced to reveal themselves as objects for interrogation, dissection and examination, these bodies are presented for our consumption. Here, I ask whether such consumed objects can be classed as beautiful in a Kantian sense by turning to a particular case of what I call psychopath aesthetics: those of notorious fictional cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in Hannibal on NBC (2013-5). Hannibal’s central anthropophagy compounds the synaesthetic association between beautiful murders and delicious deaths, aesthetics and taste. Whilst the horrific and taboo nature of Hannibal’s crimes might seem to preclude any Kantian approach to beauty, I explore how his acting out of his psychopath morality in accordance with a psychopath aesthetics is grounded in Kantian hope and judgments of taste.

My presentation at the very interesting research seminar "Representations of repulsion in the ancient world", organized by my colleague Prof. Demos Spatharas at the University of Crete.

The comic poets of ancient Athens, most notably Cratinus, Crates and Aristophanes, employed a range of techniques in order to incorporate the repulsive and the disgusting into their comic fictions and utilize these emotions as elements of the comic plot and as basic instruments for the generation of laughter. Cratinus, following perhaps Epicharmus, tries to masquerade the elemental repulsion caused by the Cyclops' mythical cannibalism under the parody of gourmandism and contemporary culinary literature. Crates and Aristophanes use disgust as a powerful factor of the comic effect, when they dramatize archetypical dark themes of fairytale and horror, such as monsters and dragon-slaying. The elements of disgust, especially the disgust provoked by the filthy secretions of the human body and the by-products of digestion, are then employed in order to undermine the terror inspired by the monster and in order to turn the horrific spectacle into something despicable and laughable. Crates seems to have used this comic strategy purely for the purposes of entertainment, but Aristophanes invests it with political messages and subjugates it to the ideological polemics of his satirical oeuvre. In Aristophanic comedy the monster is almost always identified with the accursed populist demagogues, such as Cleon and his clique. The elements of disgust thus serve to dispel the fear for these formidable figures of Athenian politics and inspire repulsion and loathing for their corruption.

Cannibalism and male homosexuality are inextricably linked in modern cannibal horror. The associations between male homosexuality and cannibalism in horror films from the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century are the result of a twofold drive. On one level, these films profoundly “Other” narratively-irredeemable villains, while at the same time providing another point of deviance for sympathetic villains to discard. At the same time, these films have a dramatic interest in creating villains and situations that maximize the audience’s revulsion and discomfort (and thus the catharsis via confrontation in a controlled setting, and transcendence through leaving the theatre). These films depict cannibalism as a homosocially transgressive act—a transgression that may not be immediately apparent to the victim of cannibalism. Cannibal horror depicts a threat to the presumed-normal and socially-accepted heterosexual and homosocial relationships that transcends mere moral panic or anti-gay hysteria. This genre develops cannibalism into a taboo even more horrifying to the viewer than societal mores would already have him or her believe. This abjection-association attempts to make monsters of those whose homosocial relationships in any way deviate from the heterosexual standard—most notably, homosexual men. Modern cannibal horror decries any sexual expression beyond tightly-constrained and strictly-defined heterosexuality as not only socially deviant, but also intensely repugnant, morally transgressive, and, ultimately, punished by death.

In the opening credits of "Apéritif" (1.01), the first episode of the NBC series Hannibal (2013-2015), comes the acknowledgement that the show is based on characters from the Thomas Harris novel, Red Dragon. This is an unexpected deviation from 'based on the book' acknowledgements typical of text-to-screen adaptations; one that, even at this early point, signals

En la serie Hannibal palpita una horrible voluntad estética, un lirismo casi poético que busca la belleza que habita en el horror, a través de ese trenebrismo caravaggiesco que vemos en su fotografía. Se trata de una belleza ponzoñosa, macabra, con una tétrica teatralidad concretada en encuadres, colores y atmósferas. Hannibal plantea una obra de arte total, una Gesamtkunstwerk donde destacan inevitablemente las categorías de lo bello y lo siniestro, en las que la narración se apoya para hacer aceptable la visión del horror, así como en otros elementos que convierten al personaje en una oscura versión del artista romántico.

Para analizar la repulsión en la ficción televisiva contemporánea, este capítulo se propone, en primer lugar, acotar el asco en el terreno de las emociones. A continuación, desentrañaremos la “paradoja de la aversión”, esto es, la relación entre el estatus ficcional de lo inmundo y su disfrute estético. Y, por último, abordaremos cómo el propio formato serial, con su longitud y sus cíclicas estrategias empáticas, facilita la superación de las barreras de lo repelente –al mismo tiempo que lo emplea como reclamo– para alcanzar una “estilización de lo repugnante”.

In this article I address some of the practical consequences of adopting translation theory concepts within the field of adaptation studies. More specifically, I question the validity of the hypothesis that adaptation studies, allegedly a discipline in shambles, is in desperate need of a theoretical crossover with translation studies. While examining the claims made by, among others, Patrick Cattrysse, Lawrence Venuti and Hugo de Campos, and confronting them with the theories espoused by several cultural studies scholars, I intend to establish whether translation studies indeed deserves to be extolled as a major source inspiration for adaptation studies. Furthermore, the usefulness of such notions as the Polysystem Theory, interpretants or transluciferation, are tested against the complex case of novel-to-film adaptation, namely the 2013 TV series Hannibal, which is based on the widely acclaimed Thomas Harris literary franchise.

El artículo explora cómo la serie de televisión Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015) provoca una honda delectación estética, a pesar de presentar numerosos contenidos repulsivos o incómodos. Se analiza cómo la naturaleza serial de la narración televisiva habilita una manera particular de negociar la paradoja de la aversión mediante tres estrategias textuales: un dilatado character engagement, un suspense que exprime las posibilidades estéticas de la prolongación temporal y una bella puesta en escena de motivos visuales y acciones horripilantes. Son estrategias que generan una robusta fascinación en el espectador, lo que permite subvertir las características de lo repugnante.

A psychiatrist narrates what at first appears to be a patient’s story, then a friend’s story involving a patient, that increasingly becomes his own story through his narrative choices. Are we then - as reader - an audience, a confidant, a witness, perhaps the narrator’s own therapist? Patrick McGrath’s Asylum (1996) sets up these subject positions within the text, both as characters and as possible reading positions, and then blurs the boundaries. Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, as the television show Hannibal (2013 -2015), develops the same technique. The entire third (final?) season of the series is devoted to psychiatrists and psychological profilers, who may also be murderers and lovers, debating agency, observation, participation, and responsibility. The focus of all this psychiatric narration is the same; sex and death.

This paper explores the disruption of genre and the text/audience dynamic in these fictions about analysis, analysts, adulterers, and murderers.  Asylum reads like literary fiction; described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’i it yet treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror. Fuller has declared, repeatedly, that Hannibal is not ‘television [but] a pretentious 80’s arthouse movie’. However, it opens with the structure and conventions of the serial investigative procedural. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured, like the bodies of the victims, the psyches of the characters, and the perspective of the audience. Just who is taking whom to pieces?

In this paper we analyse the television series Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, based on Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, from the perspective of Art and Horror, which contitutes a new approach on the analysis of the series. Through our analysis  we found that artistic references are used in the progress of the narrative, and in the presentation of visual translations of fundamental ideas like the divine through references to Bosch, or Caravaggio, the idea of becoming through references to Botticelli, as well as the image of Wendigo Man, the idea of lost time through the reference to Dali, the idea of deconstruction through references to Picasso, and the idea of the demonic through William Blake.
Therefore we concluded that references to art also legitimize the elevation of horror to art, as in Hannibal's citation of Piero della Francesca in the Eye of God. Horror is elevated to art by Hannibal not only on his tableaux vivants-like compositions such as the corpse of Beverly Katz that cites Damien Hirst, but also on the kitchen, by turning his victims into an edible performance-like spectacle for his guests. Hannibal also focuses his attention on Will Graham leading to the human broken heart (S3:02) in the Palatine Chapel in Pallermo, that was designed with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and the body of Antony Dimmond. This work correlates to the metaphor of Hannibal, Will and Zephyr, Chloris and her transformation in Flora, from Botticelli’s The Primavera, as love develops the transformation and creates violence and horror. Since the idea of death is fundamental to perceive art in horror, that concept is present in all aspects of the show such as in Hannibal’s cannibalism, that Hannibal perceives as divine interventions, that result in his art creations with the bodys of the rude.

AN EXTENDED VERSION OF THIS PAPER HAS NOW BEEN PUBLISHED AS  as: “NBC's Hannibal and the Politics of Audience Engagement.” In: _TransgressiveTelevision. Politics and Crime in 21st-Century American TV Series._ Ed. Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Ganser, and Nicole Poppenhagen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 303-328. For more info, see: https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6544-8/Daewes_ea_Eds_Transgressive_Television/

see also: https://www.academia.edu/22610140/NBCs_Hannibal_and_the_Politics_of_Audience_Engagement_PRE-PUBLICATION_DRAFT_

Abstract:
From high production values, a reliance on complex, ongoing story-lines built around the conflict of two deeply flawed, white, male, sociopathic main characters and a surreal, symbolist visual aesthetics, to an overwhelmingly positive reception by television critics and a tendency to score poorly in the Nielsen ratings – NBC's Hannibal (since 2013) exhibits all the features commonly associated with American “Quality” television programming. Located somewhere between the genres of police procedural, psychological thriller, and body horror, the show – which is based on characters from Thomas Harris' series of novels about the suave culinarian and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and which accordingly offers weekly displays of gruesome violence, bodily mutilation, cannibalism and psychological torture that rival similarly graphic depictions in movies like Silence of the Lambs or Red Dragon – furthermore exhibits a tendency to push the boundaries of what level of graphic violence is acceptable within the traditionally conservative medium of American network television. Somewhat surprisingly, and despite its controversial nature and poor ratings, Hannibal has managed to sustain a run of two seasons and was recently renewed for a third – an unlikely development within the framework of advertisement-based television.
In order to explain the unlikely continued presence of Hannibal on NBC, this paper argues that the show's relative success is indebted to its peculiar combination of “complex” linear serial narration (Mittell), the non-linear seriality typically associated with practices of rebooting, remaking, or adaptation, and a non-narrative serialization of potentially disruptive images of bodily mutilation and distress that punctuates and counterbalances the narrative complexities of the show. I argue that Hannibal's combination of these different aspects of serialization is integral to what I call its politics of serial engagement, i.e. the show's ability turn its viewers from passive recipients to active promoters of the program who engage in a variety of textually and culturally productive fan practices online. These practices, in turn, contribute to the show's cultural visibility and, ultimately, to its bottom-line profitability – Hannibal, and other shows like it, can thus thrive on the “free” (i.e. unpaid) work of  audiences in order to sustain their own continued proliferation.

Works of art seem to be enjoying increased presence in scripted TV shows nowadays. Most frequently, they constitute a symbolic point of reference, an intertextual " interlude " , or merely a convenient plot device. However, Bryan Fuller's 2013 TV series Hannibal goes beyond the stereotypical functions of art, using it as an intermediary between literary and televisual fantasies and elevating its narrative status. Arguably, works of art in Hannibal constitute the key element to understanding character development and transmutation in its three seasons. This article will focus on the ramifications of making Sandro Botticelli's ever-elusive Primavera a striking aspect of Hannibal's third season. By foregrounding the motif of becoming visualized in the painting, Fuller repurposes and refocuses the literary franchise and its cinematic offshoots. As a result, a more in-depth portrayal of the show's principal characters is offered, with their unending, but ultimately incomplete and toxic alchemical cycle of purification, " fiery love " , rebirth and death: stages representing the " enlightenment and perfection " of human souls (Gillies, Botticelli's Primavera 133). Alongside other masterpieces displayed in the series, Primavera helps destabilise the confines of the televisual medium and of the horror genre, while at the same time demonstrating the complexity of transmedial connections and influences.

Manche Krankheitsbilder haben sprechende Namen: das Hiob-Syndrom bezieht sich auf die alttestamentarische Gestalt und bezeichnet eine Hauterkrankung; das Undine-Syndrom verweist auf das mythologische Wasserwesen und beschreibt eine Störung der Atemregulation; das Felix-Krull-Syndrom rekurriert auf Thomas Manns fabulierenden Hochstapler und verdeutlicht den pathologischen Lügner; und das Truman-Syndrom verknüpft die Filmfigur Truman Burbank mit einer paranoischen Störung. Die Bezeichnung solcher und anderer Syndrome leitet sich nicht wie üblich aus der Ätiologie oder der Pathogenese ab. Die literarischen und filmischen Narrative entwickeln eine derart starke Dynamik, dass sie Elemente eines medizinischen Wissens werden.

Jeder Beitrag des Bandes stellt ein Syndrom in den Mittelpunkt, um das Nachleben eines historischen, literarischen und medialen Wissens in der medizinischen Nomenklatur zu untersuchen. Dabei wird deutlich, inwiefern Literatur und Film einen Zugang zu Akteuren, Leiden und Erleben einer Krankheit ermöglichen. Offensichtlich wird aber auch, inwiefern die Geschichte der ‚literarischen‘ und ‚filmischen‘ Syndrome eine Geschichte der Überinterpretation, Irrwege und Missverständnisse ist.

This paper looked at online communication between producers of BBC's show Sherlock and NBC's show Hannibal with their fans. The main aim was to investigate engagement of producers with fans on social media and the use of accounts on social media, e.g. whether TV shows interact with fans through the use of the official network, a production company affiliated accounts or people involved with the show use their own accounts to communicate with fans. Kent and Taylor's five features of dialogic public relations (Mutuality, Propinquity, Empathy, Risk and Commitment) were used to analyse communication. The results show that two shows share many similarities but the main differences in approach to communication come from the business structure of two broadcasters, public versus commercial. Both shows also showed evidence of dialogic PR techniques, but BBC's Sherlock also utilised elements of publicity.

In the first episode of Hannibal (2013-15), FBI profiler Will Graham is called to examine a body impaled on antlers in the middle of a field – presumably the work of the so-called Minnesota Shrike. Graham quickly determines that, while this crime superficially resembles that of other Shrike victims, its difference is such that this ‘field kabuki’ is clearly the work of a copycat killer with a much different modus operandi; one that equips Graham to better understand the Shrike’s motives and methods by contrast. In this paper, I argue that Hannibal itself might be understood as a fan object that similarly illuminates by contrast certain, increasingly ungeneralizable assumptions in the field of media fan studies, by confounding fan studies’ ongoing emphasis on oppositionality – canon vs. fanfiction, producers vs. fans, gift vs. money economies – as constitutive of, in particular, transformative fandoms. No simple adaptation, Hannibal is an intensely transformative text that repurposes both antecedent novels and their film adaptations in imagining a non- canonical relationship between Graham and Hannibal Lecter. Claims of creating fanfiction are a common tactic amongst “fanboy auteurs” – of which Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller is one – aimed at demonstrating “an understanding of [fans’] textual desires and practices” (Scott 2013, 44). In contrast, Hannibal is not only formally fanfictional, but its creators also claim fan community belonging through their awareness of, and demonstrated respect for, the show’s fans and their fanworks. Moreover, they do this in such a way that these claims of being fellow ‘fannibals’ are widely accepted within Hannibal’s social media-centered fan communities. Thus, while not losing sight of the very real inequalities of social, industrial, and economic capital between creators and fans, this paper argues that Hannibal nonetheless problematizes fan studies’ generalized framework of fan/industry oppositionality in ways that demand a more case-centered approach to media and their fans.

Beauty has many contradictory associations, from ephemerality to permanence, the natural to the artificial. When we attempt to locate the beautiful, notions of ‘conventional’ beauty often conflict with individual assessments of what is beautiful. We are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder(s), but is beauty only ever a perception, or can it be an intrinsic quality of objects and people? Is it possible to define the nature of the aesthetic experience? Beauty may trigger philosophical or spiritual contemplation, but it can also evoke possessiveness and lust. Historically, beauty has been admired as virtuous and feared as dangerous. Do judgements about beauty do a disservice to their object, or do they elevate it?