Books by Ewa M Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Adaptation and Beyond: hybrid Transtextualities, 2023
Drawing attention to the proliferation of new sites and forms of adaptation practice and the incr... more Drawing attention to the proliferation of new sites and forms of adaptation practice and the increasing importance of hybridity in contemporary adaptation studies, the Editors introduce the concept of transmediality as an interdisciplinary tool for approaching literary and film adaptations as hybrid transtextualities. They make a case for a broader view of adaptation as transmedia “world-building,” developing their argument in dialogue with the theories of Henry Jenkins, Gérard Gennette, Robert Stam, Homi Bhabha, Linda Hutcheon, and Irina Rajewsky, among others. The productive entanglement of transmedia and adaptation studies expands current critical idiom and better captures the ontological and epistemological complexity of hybrid transtexual adaptations.
Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands, 2024
Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands
The territories acquired by Poland after the Second World War, though officially called “regaine... more The territories acquired by Poland after the Second World War, though officially called “regained” or “recovered”, have been perceived by the new authorities as well as by the displaced, relocated inhabitants (DPs) as hinterlands. Focusing on Lower Silesia, the chapter demonstrates that only after the end of the Iron Curtain divide did the difficult process of inhabiting the “regained territories” begin to surface, not only in academic research but also in popular novels, non-fiction and films. The chapter argues that the new writing (post 1989) brings into view the multimodal complexity of the territories, admitting to their earlier “invisibility” and cultural absence. It is the new writing that voices the need to revisit and re-search the land’s multilayered landscape and complex network of relations (Karolina Kusznik, Eva Stachniak), both past and present. In search of a new cognitive map, the writers adopt multiple policies which mediate meaning by blending fact and fiction, stories of detection with the gothic and the noir, like in the novels by Marek Krajewski, Joanna Bator, Olga Tokarczuk and Eva Stachniak, or in Rojst (Mire), a film series directed by Jan Holoubek in which the 1997 Millennium Flood literally uncovers the land’s layered palimpsest.
Routledge, 2023
This interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, t... more This interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, that put hybridity, transtextuality, and transmediality at play. It reframes adaptation in terms of the transmedia concept of "worldbuilding," which accurately captures the complexity and multidirectionality of contemporary scattered and ubiquitous practices of adaptation. The editors argue that the process of moving stories or their elements across different media platforms and repurposing them for new uses results in the production of hybrid transtextualities. The book demonstrates how hybrid textualities augment narrative and literary forms as goals of their worldbuilding, finding unexpected sites of cross-pollination, expansion, and appropriation in spoken-word and dance performance, (auto)biographical comics, advertising, Chinese Kun opera, and popular song lyrics. This yoking of hybridity and transmediality yields not only diversified and often commercialized aesthetic forms but also enables the emergence a unique cultural space in-between, a mezzaterra capable of addressing current political issues and mobilizing broader audiences
Brno Studies in English , 2018
This article looks at Ivan Vladislavić's literary explorations of the urban in post-apartheid Sou... more This article looks at Ivan Vladislavić's literary explorations of the urban in post-apartheid South Africa, notably those concentrating on and around the city of Johannesburg, drawing examples from The Restless Supermarket (2001), Portrait with Keys: the City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), and The Exploded View (2004). Reading Vladislavić, the article traces the writer's involvement with categories, methods and cartographies through which urbanity and urban life after apartheid could be addressed and understood. A point of departure for the discussion is the epistemological crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which challenged the positivist policy in urban research, thereby destabilising the intellectual foundations of urban as well as literary studies concentrating on urbanism. The analysis, recognising the inadequacy of the earlier categories related to the concept of the bounded city, concentrates on a search for new ways of knowing and investigating the increasingly complex urbanity.
The present article seeks to explore Neil Gaiman's alternate construal of London in Neverwhere - ... more The present article seeks to explore Neil Gaiman's alternate construal of London in Neverwhere - a fantasy novel referring to both the nineteenth-century sewer subgenre and to Henry Mayhew's sociological study, London Labour and the London Poor - with its pervasive difficulty to place the city either conceptually or visually. Seeing London becomes, first and foremost, an encounter with the invisible, a gift of vision and a persuit of a phantom always on the move but, ultimately, unfathomable. Absence of a tangible organising image, I argue, is consequence of painful placelessness revealing, more telling indeed, an underlying impossibility of ontology. Thus the novel focuses on the act of writing as reading "in ruins", which consists in tracing the "bits" of raw materiality, memory and spectrality, on relaying legacies, reconfiguring constellations of "textual" events and regimes. The city emerges from the process as a spectral machine apprehended through its revenant traces, present through a disquieting anamnesis - a city of the mind though not a utopia. It seems that Gaiman's London appeals to the mind's eye by evoking the seemingly tangible grid topography of the underground - called the "red skeleton" in Julian Barnes's Metroland - but offers, ultimately, very little to the eye. More pertinent in the proposed construal is the ethical dilemma of responsibility.
The East End remains a topographically uncertain territory. Its multiple ontological properties ... more The East End remains a topographically uncertain territory. Its multiple ontological properties as well as its representation as an intensely mythicized location have been immersed in discourses of de- and regeneration. The east side of London has been visualised as a run-down dock area; an atrophied part of the urban body; an ill-favoured, stigmatised social space associated with evil, with the primitive and the uncivilised. In contrast to these bleak, abysmal visions, some cultural constructions and urban policies concentrate on dreams of rebuilding and curing the dis-eased urban body, treating it as "a recovered lung". A belief in the transformative potential of the run-down urban landscape pervades the writings of Philip Ridley. The article argues that rather than celebrating the eradication of post-industrial scars, Philip Ridley finds the dilapidated sights of the East End valuable and proposes to repackage them as objects of reflective nostalgia or objets trouvés – surreal found objects – and thus as properties of the unconscious. Further on, the article argues that Ridley's re-envisioning of the East End enable his young protagonists to conceive a self-image that permits a transcendence of their sense of loss and dislocation, a perilous process in which the desire to protect normative behaviour signals its presence through the endurance of an imagined or recollected, dreadful but regenerative cityscape.
Keywords: Philip Ridley, ruins, nostalgia, gentrification, revitalisation, storytelling
The authors of this volume discuss the tangible need for a revision of the vocabulary of emotion ... more The authors of this volume discuss the tangible need for a revision of the vocabulary of emotion used in literary criticism and culture studies. The articles offer a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to emotional states such as love, shame, grief, nostalgia and trauma. They demonstrate that the once stable concept of emotion disintegrates in the course of re-evaluation and is replaced by such notions as affects, passions, feelings and emotions. This volume examines the representations of emotion in drama, poetry and prose – from the anonymous Court of Love (ca. 1500) to Ali Smith's How to Be Both (2014)-as well as in life writing, music, the visual arts and theology.
Papers by Ewa M Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Literatures, 2016
Text Matters, Oct 25, 2017
Routledge eBooks, Jul 25, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Jul 25, 2023
Macbeth, Macbeth is a complex case of transmodalisation ostensibly promoting an expansion or a se... more Macbeth, Macbeth is a complex case of transmodalisation ostensibly promoting an expansion or a sequel in its paratextual frame. Although the title announces overt engagement with both the object and discourse of Macbeth – a revisitation of the classic – the project avoids tying in with the source, and refrains from repetition and a recycling of either characters or plots, thus radically reducing recognisability to the title and a selection of epiphanic moments set in an entirely new story. Written by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey, complemented with visual material by Tom de Freston, the fragmentary form is immersed in heteroglossia, and goes beyond reimagining, explaining, and commenting on the announced source either explicitly or parodically. On the contrary, the chapter proposes that the new work – the hypertext – converges on what is absent from the inspiring text and what has been defined, at its best, as the off-stage area of Duncan’s chamber, a subtext and a metaphorical wound. Deploying a myriad of fragmentary quotations and images, Macbeth, Macbeth incorporates them verbally and visually to produce a hybrid generative compost. The chapter argues that the project breaks the boundaries of adaptation, by consistently withdrawing from the binary concepts that operate in adaptations and which have been dominant in adaptation studies, as well as in academic protocols isolating theory from practice, and literature from criticism, in order to recognise their coexistence in a ‘hopeful’ hybridity that combines literary experimentation and creative criticism.
Presses universitaires François-Rabelais eBooks, 2005
A belief in the nobility of sight constitutes one of the most powerful myths of Western philosoph... more A belief in the nobility of sight constitutes one of the most powerful myths of Western philosophy and culture. The dominant scholarly reception of the Hellenic heritage provided further arguments for the recognition of the hegemonic visual angle. The persistent conviction that the master sense is associated with the eye stands in opposition to the Hebraic privilege granted to the ear and the modern hierarchy of senses placing sight behind hearing and touch (Jay, 1994, 34-35). The Hellenic ph..
Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, Dec 30, 2022
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Books by Ewa M Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Keywords: Philip Ridley, ruins, nostalgia, gentrification, revitalisation, storytelling
Papers by Ewa M Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Keywords: Philip Ridley, ruins, nostalgia, gentrification, revitalisation, storytelling