Liberature

The paper defines liberature (Pol. liberatura) as a distinct literary genre whose constitutive feature is an organic unity of the linguistic content with its material form. It discusses the difference of the postulated genre from “the artist’s book” in which the emphasis lies on the visual rather than textual component. Through a discussion of works of Bryan Stanley Johnson, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce and contemporary Polish writers, Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, it addresses the question of iconic qualities of liberature, and places the concept in the context of earlier theoretical reflection, especially, Carl Darryl Malmgren’s notion of iconic space in the novel. In particular, iconic compositional space can be identified as a touchstone for the liberatic character of a literary work.