Liberature: A Book-Bound Genre - Paperback

by Katarzyna Bazarnik (Author)

This book discusses the concept of liberature, a term coined by the Polish poet Zenon Fajfer in 1999 to refer to a kind of writing that fuses text with its material form into a conceptual whole in the space of the book. In her monograph, described by the author as "the fruit of miscegenation between a scholar and a creative writer," Katarzyna Bazarnik explains how liberature is indebted to modernist explorations of the materiality of writing pointed out by Jerome McGann, as well as practices of "presentification" described by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. She flags affinities between liberature and related concepts: N. Katherine Hayles's technotexts, Jessica Pressman's bookishness, Lori Emerson's reading-writing interfaces, and Alison Gibbons's analyses of multimodal literature. Finally, reading liberature through contemporary genre theory, she proposes to see it as a multimodal, literary genre bound to the architecture of the material book.

Author Biography

Katarzyna Bazarnik is assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is the author of Joyce and Liberature (2011) and the editor or coeditor of several volumes including James Joyce and After: Writer and Time (2010), Liberature or Total Literature: Collected Essays 1999-2009 (2010), and Incarnations of Material Textuality: From Modernism to Liberature (2014). She has also coauthored liberatic books: a triple-volume Oka-leczenie (Mute-I-Late, 2000)and (O)patrzenie (Ga(u)ze, 2003) written jointly with Zenon Fajfer. Together they curate the Liberature Reading Room in the Main Public Library in Krakow and edit an imprint called Liberatura in Ha!art Publishing House.