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.
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.
Certain works diverge from this concept of linear, textual reading such as those by Umberto Eco or Roland Barthes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a translated explanation of the concept, Fajfer describes liberature as "a type or genre of literature in which the text is integrated with the physical space of the book into a meaningful whole and in which all elements (from the graphic ones to the kinds of paper (or other material) and the physical shape of the book) may contribute to its meaning".
After conception, the idea was developed by Katarzyna Bazarnik who, basing her reflections on the analysis of the works by James Joyce, demonstrated that the similarity of the text and the form creates iconicity.
Fajfer's 'liberature' is in no immediate denotational relation with various earlier uses of the word, including the English legal synonym for “livery”, the name of a program of Czech Radio,[2] and the term coined by Julián Ríos for the novel Larva (1983).
[3] Considering liberature anachronistically, it is noteworthy that writers began experimenting with literary forms as early as in the Baroque period.
The unusual structure of the works forces the readers to focus their attention, to choose the beginning and the end of the text, and – most importantly – form another level of signification.
The works that may be considered liberature avant la lettre were penned by such writers as William Blake, Blaise Cendrars, B.S.
Johnson, James Joyce, Stéphane Mallarmé, Raymond Queneau, Laurence Sterne, or Stanisław Wyspiański.
In the case of American postmodernist writers, Raymond Federman, Robert Gass and Ronald Sukenick come to the fore of what can be called liberature.
[5] One of Nowakowski's most prominent works is Ulica Sienkiewicza w Kielcach (Sienkiewicz Street in Kielce) published in 2002.
[6] In the works where Nowakowski provides the reader with three versions of the text – Polish, English and Esperanto – one could observe certain differences in the rendition of the same topic, the technique which contributes to the further differentiation of the book's meaning.
In an organized manner, liberature in Poland, including both Polish texts and translated work, has been presented in the Liberatura series published by Korporacja Ha!art seated in Kraków.
Polish translation of Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard by Tomasz Różycki.
Foer has taken his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story.
[7] Although the authors creating liberature frequently apply the traditional ways of publication (chiefly paper books), they also appreciate other possibilities.
The project called Libro 2N,[9] was defined as a "journey into BLIN concept", which was enacted inside a book represented by the old workshop.