The diversity of language of form - the visual and verbal nature of Liberature, the library collection from University Library in Poznań

Abstract

This article discusses a number of examples of liberature works, in which the text and the material form of a book constitute an inseparable whole and the artistic message is transmitted not only through the verbal medium, but also through the author “speaking” via book as a whole, from the perspective of verbal and visual communication. The paper focuses on the following works: Anne Carson’s Nox, Herta Müller’s The Guard Takes His Comb, Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik’s Oka-leczenie [Eyes-ore], Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, and Radosław Nowakowski’s (including the collection of poems Nieopisanie świata [Non-description of the world]). Verbal expressions of an idea or thought and the accompanying mental image in these works permeate and often overlap, thus adding new meanings to the existing ones, and in this way expand their interpretative implications, while the abundance of the solutions adopted by the authors is stunning. At every instance, this formal innovativeness, adjusted appropriately to the content, supports and revises the meanings in a given work, and additionally influences its reception providing incentives and new stimuli within the reading comprehension process.