Ludmila Gruszewska-Blaim – författare

Imperfect Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema is a collection of studies on filmic dystopias: Goto, the Island of Love; Even Dwarfs Started Small; Stalker; Videodrome; Sexmission; Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes; Kingsajz; Equilibrium; V for Vendetta; Children of Men; The Aerial. Employing a variety of theoretical perspectives (from cultural semiotics to post-structuralist approach), the authors analyse films from different cultural, linguistic and political contexts, demonstrating the interplay between the formulaic dystopian facade and narratological inventiveness, heightened intertextuality, and generic hybridity. The contributors also explore the ways in which dystopian cinema adapts the motifs and techniques borrowed from classic literary dystopias.

The volume comprises adaptation studies of ten selected utopian/dystopian fictions written and filmed in Europe and America during the 20th and 21st centuries: Things to Come, Lost Horizon, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies, The Andromeda Nebula, Brave New World, Total Recall, The Secret Garden, Harrison Bergeron and Never Let Me Go. It focuses not only on the ways of constructing fictional realities and techniques of rendering literary utopias/dystopias into film, but also on their cultural and political determinants.

This study focuses on presenting the techniques of reworking and incorporating intertextual material into contemporary British fiction. Analysing emblematic intertextual strategies: adaptation, pastiche, transworld identity, and historiographic metafiction, the study provides a good insight into how the intertextual impulse can be inscribed not only in the structure and semantics of a given text but also in the narrative plane. Adopting Gerard Genette’s and Boris Uspensky’s theoretical models, the book aims to demonstrate how the discussed intertextual strategies transform a source text, genre, or literary component and how these creative decodings function on different planes of a literary text.

«Academia in Fact and Fiction» comprises twenty-eight essays on the relationship(s) between the university and the practice of belles lettres. The collection includes studies of the teaching of fiction by university professors; the fit – or misfit – between the creative writer and the academy; the depiction of the university, its staff and atmosphere, in literature, cinema and new media; and the varieties of academic fiction ranging from the ludic and satirical to the tragic. Most of the works addressed in the volume are British or American, modern or contemporary, but the historical range extends to Victorian and Shakespearian works, and the geographical range includes novels and poems from Russia, New Zealand, and Nigeria. Among the genres discussed are, in addition to the «literary novel», plays, detective fiction, fanfiction, utopias, mysteries and alternative history. The contributors are international and cosmopolitan.

The book focuses on contemporary staff-centred mystery novels set in the academic domain, written by scholars who enrich the generic convention of the detective novel with their academic expertise. The author delineates the academic mystery genre conventions and their connection with the characteristics of both the classical detective novel and the academic (university) novel. The analysis shows that the academic mystery novel not only fills in the classical detective formula with academic discourse, university settings, and the characters and conflicts of academics from different echelons of the university hierarchy but also, and more importantly, refers to and comments upon the current situation of tertiary education.

The rapid development of the TV series in the twenty-first century has resulted in an emergence of new aesthetic, cultural, and social trends. The development has influenced both the mainstream of popular culture and reception practices of audiences across nations and platforms. This book observes how the means employed in key contemporary TV series texts and a specific thematic variety have promoted new reception styles and redefined conventional interpretive practices. The authors analyze a variety of series released since 2000 to discuss historical (dis)continuities of genres and conventions, and observe how interpretive competences promoted by the rhetoric of contemporary TV series result from, and are polemical with, the conventions of visual and verbal cultures of preceding decades.