Leonid Bilmes
@lang.hse.ru
Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages
Higher School of Economics
EDUCATION
Ph.D. Queen Mary University of London, 2019
MA University of York, 2013
BA (Hons) University of the Witwatersrand, 2009
RESEARCH INTERESTS
contemporary British and American literature; narrative; literary theory; autobiography; memory studies; speculative fiction; philosophy and literature
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Leonid Bilmes
Malaga University
This article argues that Videodrome and the film’s novelization can both be said to adapt McLuhan’s account of television in Understanding Media. Cronenberg’s film adopts McLuhan’s style of thought by rendering figurative language as visceral cinematic image; Martin’s novelization, in turn, uses the literary device of ekphrasis to depict the protagonist’s TV-possessed inner world. Videodrome the film and Videodrome the novel express, respectively, the cinematic imaging and the synesthetic verbal description of media as «the extensions of man». The essay concludes that attending to the ways in which both the film and the novel adapt McLuhan’s writing not only attests to the intermedial nature of the interpretive act, but helps delineate the contours of the contemporary media landscape.
Leonid Bilmes
Springer International Publishing
Leonid Bilmes
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT This essay reads Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, alongside contemporary accounts of narrative time and digital memory technologies, and argues that this narrative reflects on a shift in temporality, whereby present experience is increasingly relegated to future recollection. Bernard Stiegler provides a useful analysis of this situation, as his philosophical account of technics foregrounds memory’s reliance on technology, whereby the present is increasingly archived as a future memory. Stiegler also insists that every tool carries within itself a capacity for re-invention and projection into different futures, and this essay reads narrative form in this sense of an inventive technics capable of projecting us not into actual futures, but into a sense of future possibility. Lerner’s narrator may be read as seeking to open up the future by revisiting possibilities which his past self once imagined, and also by imagining future moments of retrospect from which he will one day have recounted his experience. It is in the mode of the anticipation of retrospection that a sense of the future is kept open in this novel, despite the temporally foreclosed structure of an already written narrative.
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