Liberature or Literature in the Electric Age

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis

Abstract

The article proposes a media-oriented approach to liberature, a literary trend born in Poland at the end of the 20th century which aims at reconsidering the physical body of the book as an integral part of the literary work. The idea of liberature is not only a contemporary literary programme, but it has also helped in redefining phenomena from the past hitherto considered to be marginal. The thesis of the article is that this corporeal turn is directly connected with what Marshall McLuhan has called the electric age – a time in which electrical media have put an end to print culture and consequently to the predominance of sight over other senses, to standardisation, specialisation, and linear thinking in favour of a new audio-tactile sensibility. Liberature, if considered from this point of view, turns out to be not a form of resistance of old print culture in a digital world, but the natural consequence of a change of paradigm we can trace also in other fields such as physics and linguistics where the concept of embodiment has occupied a central position for several decades. Hence, far from being a curiosity at the periphery of contemporary literature, it ought to be considered as an important expression of present times.