Leonid Bilmes

@lang.hse.ru

Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages
Higher School of Economics

Leonid Bilmes


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https://researchid.co/leonid.bilmes

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
4

Scopus Publications

36

Scholar Citations

2

Scholar h-index

2

Scholar i10-index

Scopus Publications

  • Cronenberg Adapts (Us to) McLuhan: Watching Videodrome, Reading Understanding Media
    Leonid Bilmes
    Trasvases Entre La Literatura Y El Cine, 2024
    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.
  • Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust: Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection
    Leonid Bilmes
    Ekphrasis Memory and Narrative After Proust Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection, 2022
  • Oneself as Character: Emplotment, Memory and Metaphor in Ricoeur, Bakhtin and Nabokov’s The Gift
    Leonid Bilmes
    Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, 2022
  • ‘an actual present alive with multiple futures’: narrative, memory and time in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
    Leonid Bilmes
    Textual Practice, 2020
    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.

RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • C21’s Roundtable Review of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022)
    T Bewes, L Bilmes, O Haslam, A Houen, A Kelly, D Wong, LA Zander
    C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 12 (3) , 2026
    2026
  • C21 ’s Roundtable Review of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect (2022)
    T Bewes, L Bilmes, O Haslam, A Houen, A Kelly, D Wong, LA Zander
    C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 12 (3), 1-29 , 2025
    2025
  • Cronenberg Adapts (Us to) McLuhan: Watching Videodrome, Reading Understanding Media
    L Bilmes
    Trasvases entre la literatura y el cine, 24-49 , 2024
    2024
    Citations: 2
  • Ekphrasis, memory and narrative after Proust: prose pictures and fictional recollection
    L Bilmes
    Bloomsbury Publishing , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 11
  • Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger
    L Bilmes
    Philosophy Now 146, 48-50 , 2021
    2021
  • ‘an actual present alive with multiple futures’: narrative, memory and time in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
    L Bilmes
    Textual Practice 34 (7), 1081-1102 , 2020
    2020
    Citations: 23

MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • ‘an actual present alive with multiple futures’: narrative, memory and time in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
    L Bilmes
    Textual Practice 34 (7), 1081-1102 , 2020
    2020
    Citations: 23
  • Ekphrasis, memory and narrative after Proust: prose pictures and fictional recollection
    L Bilmes
    Bloomsbury Publishing , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 11
  • Cronenberg Adapts (Us to) McLuhan: Watching Videodrome, Reading Understanding Media
    L Bilmes
    Trasvases entre la literatura y el cine, 24-49 , 2024
    2024
    Citations: 2
  • C21’s Roundtable Review of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022)
    T Bewes, L Bilmes, O Haslam, A Houen, A Kelly, D Wong, LA Zander
    C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 12 (3) , 2026
    2026
  • C21 ’s Roundtable Review of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect (2022)
    T Bewes, L Bilmes, O Haslam, A Houen, A Kelly, D Wong, LA Zander
    C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 12 (3), 1-29 , 2025
    2025
  • Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger
    L Bilmes
    Philosophy Now 146, 48-50 , 2021
    2021

Publications

Book reviews: