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Liberature


Liberature is literature in which the material form is considered an important part of the whole and essential to understanding the work.

Liberature refers to a new kind of literature, a trans-genre, in which the text and the material form of a book constitute an inseparable whole. The term itself is derived from the word ‘literature’, but draws from the Latin liber, meaning "a book" and "the free one", as well as libra meaning "measurement" or "writing as a measurement of words." In a work of liberature, text does not serve as the sole source of meaning; the shape and the construction of the book, its format, the number of pages, its typographical layout, the size and type of the font applied, pictures and photographs integrated with the text, and type of paper or other material used in the process of creation of the book are all taken into consideration. The reader confronts a work of liberature as a total package, which often assumes a non-traditional shape, the quality of which, in practice, sometime involves a radical separation from the traditional design of the book. Its textual message dictates the physical shape that the work finally assumes. All of this lends a level of intent and control to the creator of liberature that surpasses that of other genres.

The demands posed by liberature shape a new kind of reader. In traditional texts, the reader empirically processes the text of a work in order to attain a desired level of understanding; one follows the steps of a model reader, whose purpose is to bring oneself closer to one’s virtual model. Certain works diverge from this concept of linear, textual reading such as those by Umberto Eco or Roland Barthes. Such works introduce uncertainty into these structured expectations and programs of behavior. Neither the works of Eco nor Barthes constitute liberature, but they exemplify a difference in the quality of the programming of the reader’s experience.

The printed works of liberature, although diverse in the application, share the following variables of the traversal function:

Only in several instances the work may breach the above-mentioned scheme of characteristic variables of liberature. In all other cases, readers are responsible for configuring their reading of the text. Texts of liberature that generate multiple statements are not limited to literary works, and definitely not to electronic texts – the category embraces computer games and other forms of both ergodic and non‐ergodic literature. The former requires a non‐trivial effort to traverse the text. In a classical, non-ergodic literary work, such as The Odyssey, the reader is required only to turn the pages and to interpret the text. In permutative works – those in which the order of text is inconsequential - instead of static function defining the dynamics, something else occurs. An intratextonic dynamic, one that guides the reader throughout the text, occurs. The text is also not determinate, meaning that it lacks a specificity which would hinder interpretation and different readings. The ergodic character of the work is usually determined by the exploratory function of the reader. The parallel character of the works is written into the very core of liberature; the order in which the reader perceives the text governs the way the work is rendered. The interactive capacity of the work becomes, if not an aesthetic category, a way of the reader’s behavior that is written into the text. The work of liberature disrupts the structure of expectations based on a syntagmatic order as well as the strategies characteristic of a linear text. The works of liberature refer to the experience of simultaneousness. Furthermore, liberature as a hybrid genre incorporating the features of numerous media at the same time, including the arts, assumes a quality of simultaneousness as a dominating one.


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