Program "Diamentowy Grant"; konkurs 47

The goal of the "B.S. Johnson and liberature" project, carried out as part of the "Diamond Grant" programme and funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, is to examine the connections between the theatre and liberature - a literary genre defined by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik in 1999. The genre encompasses literary works, whose form is intentionally fused with content; whose authors employ material features of the book (the shape of a volume, layout, fonts, colour and size of the text, etc.) to convey senses. The analysis of theatre works by Fajfer and Bazarnik as well as the British avant-garde author, B.S. Johnson, reveals that chosen liberatic authors have theatrical experience. A glance at the main motifs and compositional strategies used in their plays allows me to capture how they imagined a body moving within the theatre space and how this could have influenced their approach to the book as a body and space to design. A crucial part of the project is archival research, leading to less known or new materials. Thanks to such as insight the chosen authors and their craft become even more familiar and can be better understood. The project enables me to consider new ways of interpreting their work as well as strategies to engage the reader, whose action can have performative qualities - more often than not, reading liberature implies manipulation of the book as an object, in a particular space and time. Thus, the genre defined by Fajfer and Bazarnik envisions a unique encounter between the author, who designs the work, and the reader, who picks up the book in the circumstances they find the most suitable and contributes to the meaning-making process.