ABSTRACT
In her mesmerizing and groundbreaking podcast Serial, Sarah Koenig investigates the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee and the conviction of Lee's ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. Serial provides a unique genre of audio narratology, a contemporary digital reinvention of an ancient mode of oral storytelling. In her podcast, Koenig begins with a meditation on memory and ends with larger epistemological questions concerning guilt, innocence, and legal justice. Although podcast addressees may listen individually or even provisionally-picking up a half hour here or there-they are also listening as a collective, virtual or actual. Intriguingly, Koenig divides Serial into twelve episodes, echoing the genre of the epic, and the Serial podcast is embedded in a social and national story. In an interview held at the Peabody Awards, Ira Glass, the editorial advisor for Serial, noted that the one point that they could assert was that events central to the prosecution's case could not have happened in the timeline they produced.
