The text explores the development of television, from broadcasting, through cable television, to streaming, identifying streaming as the culmination of television’s third golden age. The author analyzes the economic and technological models of content distribution and their impact on the way series are consumed. A key theme is the comparison of streaming series to books, which allow content to be consumed at any pace and in any order. Particular importance is given to the practice of “binge-watching,” as a form of consumption that best meets human cognitive and narrative needs. The text explores the tension between viewer preferences and the strategies of streaming platforms, which often revert to the episodic model for economic reasons. In conclusion, streaming is shown to be the most flexible medium, best suited to diverse ways of consuming audiovisual content.

This article analyses the structural fragmentation of Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) and its implications for the construction of character identity. Delivered as a boxed collection of disparate printed materials, Ware’s work exploits intratextuality and collage to challenge conventional storytelling. By so doing, it encourages a non-linear and participatory reading experience, as readers are asked to assemble their own story. Drawing on a multimodal analytical framework, this study aims at analysing how the fragmentation of the graphic narrative functions as a representational strategy that reflects and reinforces the characters’ fractured identities and fragmented perceptions of everyday reality, while identifying the fil rouge that connects the various pieces that make up the work in its entirety.

This article examines the audiovisual transpositions of Gogol’s Dead Souls, tracing their evolution from the first cinematic illustrations of 1909 to Grigorij Konstantinopol’skij’s recent mini-series (2020). The analysis focuses on the shifting aesthetic paradigms that shaped these adaptations – from the illustrative mode of the early silent film to the ideological framework of Soviet realism, and finally to the postmodern strategies of fragmentation, intertextuality, and parody. Particular attention is given to the emergence of seriality, which proves to be a laboratory where tradition engages with contemporary cultural practices. In this trajectory, Dead Souls reveals itself as an “open” classic, capable of generating new episodic configurations that continually renew its satirical force in dialogue with the present.

The article is devoted to the Miss Austen series, which introduces trends characteristic of audiovisual images related to creating biographies of famous people. These include narrating from the perspective of someone close to the famous creator and incorporating elements of biography. Furthermore, attention is drawn to the combination of historically confirmed facts with fiction, where the most interesting aspect from audiovisual creators’ perspective is the attempt to uncover secrets that remain unsolved to this day.

The author discusses Korean dramas (K-dramas) from the perspective of cultural narrative, the genres and narrative forms present in Korean television productions, and the reasons why K-drama fans choose them from the wide range of programming offered by streaming platforms. The discussion is situated within the context of international, intercultural, and transcultural communication, as exemplified by the phenomenon known as Hallyu — the Korean Wave. The analysis was conducted based on 131 K-dramas, as well as comments from fans of Korean dramas in a Facebook group. K-dramas embody South Korean cultural codes and patterns, possessing distinct narrative forms that set them apart from Western television offerings.

The aim of the article is to analyze the titular perspective of the voyeur in Dekalog: Six (1988) by Krzysztof Kieślowski from the perspective of contemporary ethics. The reception of a work is always conditioned by its historical context. The main character, nineteen-year-old Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko), who watches and spies on an older woman, Magda (Grażyna Szapołowska), with whom he is obsessed, is no longer perceived as a romantic hero but rather as a stalker in the context of contemporary reflection shaped by the ethics of care and the Me Too movement. A contemporary perspective, including the empowerment of female characters, the emphasis on relational ethics, and a focus on universal values, encourages a reassessment of Tomek’s behaviour towards Magda, as well as a re-evaluation of the heroine’s attitude.

This article is devoted to the series X-Rated Queen, which fits into the trend of nostalgic stories returning to the 1980s and 1990s. The authors briefly characterize contemporary streaming series and discuss the nostalgia trend in pop culture, which occurs in two variants: global (Stranger Things) and local (X-Rated Queen). In the local trend, the poli­tical context plays an important role. It is closely related to the genre chosen by the creators and particularly exposed in crime stories and thrillers. The creators of nostalgia in the local variant are a generation of directors who remember the 1980s mainly from the perspective of childhood, and whose artistic imagination is based particulary on pop culture representations of that decade. Additionally, in their productions, they break taboo topics such as homophobia (Hiacynt) or the situation of sex workers in the Polish People’s Republic (Rojst, Brokat, X-Rated Queen). In this article, the authors analyze X-Rated Queen through the prism of the glamour category, which
in the 1980s was identified with the mythical West, wealth, freedom, as well as the ability to realize one’s plans and dreams. The authors are interested not only in clear inspirations from real characters (Teresa Orłowski, Danuta Lato), but also in the glamorous, colorful, mysterious world that seduces and demoralizes the heroine.

This article examines the Netflix series Respira (2024) as a critical intervention in medical drama, exposing systemic failures in healthcare and deconstructing the myth of a heroic doctor. Set in a public hospital in Spain, the show portrays emotional burnout, institutional absurdity, and the limits of empathy under neoliberal pressure. Using a tripartite framework – system, myth, and compromise, the analysis explores the narrative strategies, in the series, its visual aesthetics, and character construction. Drawing on Polish film and cultural studies, the article positions Respira within a broader trend of deheroization in medical fiction, with references to Polish series such as Diagnoza and Na dobre i na złe.

The concept of the “series” has become central to the study of contemporary storytelling, particularly within visual media such as film, television, and comics. Scholarship in Western media theory has highlighted the tension between recurring elements and variations, as well as the recursive structures that organize complex visual narratives. In contemporary Russian comics – most notably Major Grom – the episodic format acquires distinct characteristics, blending elements of the Western superhero model with the construction of a post-Soviet national imaginary. This article investigates how the serial form operates in Major Grom, understood both as a cultural practice and a mode of production. It focuses on the tensions between episodic structure, overarching narrative, and myth-making processes.

This article discusses the tension between textual fragment and narrative unity in the gamebook genre while focusing on Italian texts. After a theoretical and historical introduction about gamebooks, we analyze significant examples like Il presidente del consiglio… sei tu! (You Are the Prime Minister!), where the multiplicity of reading paths functions as a metaphor for political opportunism, and Due delitti per un computer (Two Murders for a Computer), whose reading options are fully mapped for the reader beforehand. We then talk about branching comics, a genre pioneered by Italians, where the clear demarcations of the panels further increase the impression of a fragmentary storyworld. L’uomo Scottecs e l’ultimo giorno del mondo (Scottecs Man and the Last Day of the World) by Sio and Analwizards by David and William Genchi showcase very experimental uses of the visual fragment, while the series Grafomante, which includes blank spaces that the reader is expected to fill in with drawings, presents a case where visual fragments are reconciled and connected during the reading process.

As we often hear, what is at stake in the transition from a paper book to a digital tool is a transformation from the material world to the virtual world and from the Symbolic to
the Imaginary. The tacit assumption behind these both claims is that the material
and the virtual constitute two opposing dimensions, and that the virtual is synonymous with the immaterial. In this text, drawing on the writings of Byung-Chul Han, Jacques Lacan, and Giorgio Agamben, I argue that both these assumptions are false. First, I attempt to determine what the screen’s mirror is. What is the screen-mirror that no one sees even though everyone constantly looks at it? Is the function of the mirror to double or to annihilate the seer? Second, I ask a question about who is seen on the screen. Is the spectacle of the projected world seen, or are we instead drawn, sucked into the screen’s interior? Third, and finally, I consider the problem of the screen’s materiality and its obliteration. Is the magic of digital devices not about staging the disappearance of their own materiality? And is the description of this invisible materiality limited to describing the conditions of representation, presentation, or disclosure of the image? The answers to these three questions are intended to lead me to formulate theses about what I call the “screen unconscious.”

The fragment is a splintered presentism in an unanchored ordinance of time, caused by the trepidation that vacillates between a search for, and a liberation from, a whole. It wrenches both past and future within its collapsing, yet symptomatic, spaces of whereof to inscribe its sandstone script. These pages, fatto (d)a pezzi, are weathered planks of scaffolding left over from a view of the spaces that these fragments imagined they were surrounding, some as excerpts to unfinished monographs, a few as lines in hermetic anthologies; others as intentionally detached epigrams or maxims, and most as impossible sequences of a series of lectures.

This article examines the fragmentation of history in popular storytelling media, arguing that such fragmentation reveals more about contemporary narrative trends than about history itself. Drawing on narratological theory and the author’s experience as a TV producer, it positions fragmentation as an inevitable aspect of historical storytelling rather than a consequence of modern media. The analysis explores three dimensions: the theoretical necessity of narrative fragmentation (White, Fludernik), debates between advocates of democratized access versus critics concerned with oversimplification of traumatic events, and a heuristic perspective revealing how sensationalized fragments can be co-opted into politically motivated narratives. While acknowledging benefits of increased accessibility and representation of marginalized voices, the article highlights risks including the proliferation of ahistorical content serving extremist ideologies. The author concludes by advocating for an interdisciplinary, sociologically-informed approach to discourse analysis that examines the social forces driving contemporary reconstructions of the past.

This article examines the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic in Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico through a comparative reading of Aristotle, with particular attention to the opening of the Rhetoric, where the art of persuasion is defined as the “antistrophe” of dialectic—its complementary counterpart. Tesauro, through his peculiar conception of the rhetorical syllogism as an “entimema urbanamente fallace,” not only exceeds the Aristotelian antistrophe but also establishes a new, original relation between dialectic and rhetoric that reveals the intuition of a distinctive vision of the world and its order of truth.

This paper examines Russian satirical comedy in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role of A. Shakhovskoy, M. Zagoskin, and N. Chmel’nitsky. Although traditionally relegated to the status of minor authors, they were in fact central figures in a prolific theatrical season that enjoyed wide popularity among audiences. While drawing on French models, their comedies gradually “russified” plots, characters, and situations, thereby contributing to the shaping of a national dramaturgical identity and laying the groundwork for the subsequent development of nineteenth-century Russian theatre.