Written by Christian A. Dumais.
Originally published in SYSTEMS, Volume 13, Number 1-2, 2008.
INTRODUCTION
Writer Warren Ellis coined the term burst culture to reflect a culture receiving its entertainment and information in bursts [0]; gaining as much information and experiencing as many narratives within as short a period of time as possible. In order to achieve this, burst culture is forced to make severe choices which jeopardize established business models (when the audience chooses to bypass commercial television in order to watch serials on the Internet or DVD), and specifically endanger print (when readers choose to listen to a book on an iPod, read a book on the computer screen, or watch a film adaptation). The success of the book in the 21st century will be not only dependent on exploring new possibilities in storytelling, but in the physicality of the book itself. Books are “going to have to play to their strengths and figure out what makes them really special and what makes them work . . . the physicality and the tactile quality is one of the thing” [1]. And to counter the specific appetites of burst culture, writers need to be encouraged to have a more active role in the design of their books. This attitude is reflected in Zenon Fajfer’s liberature, a literary movement that takes the monopolizing focus away from the text and instead asks writers to consider the text along with the book’s physical shape and structure. This article will focus on Fajfer’s liberature, how it potentially borrows burst cultural concepts – such as the replayability and interface of video games – in order to validate print, and establish a criterion for a book to qualify as liberary work. The article will conclude with a recent mainstream example of a liberature and briefly examine how it potentially appeals to the burst culture.
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In his 1999 essay “Liberature (appendix to a dictionary of literary terms)” Polish writer and artist Zenon Fajfer responds to the possibility of literature exhausting itself, and writes that the “crisis of contemporary literature has its roots in its focus on the text (with the negligence of the physical shape and structure of the book), and within the text, the focus on its meaning and euphony” [2]. Fajfer goes on to list several key questions writers need to ask themselves in order to overcome the “established dogmas that still paralyze writers’ creativity and contribute to the present condition of literature” [2], and in doing so, he defines liberature. (more…)
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