Refresh the Book: On the Hybrid Nature of the Book in the Age of Electronic Publishing

Refresh the Book contains reflections on the multimodal nature of the book, focusing on its changing perception, functions, forms, and potential in the digital age. Offering an overview of key concepts and approaches, such as liberature, technotexts, and bookishness, this volume of essays addresses the specificity of the printed book as a complex cultural phenomenon. It discusses diverse forms of representation and expression, both in literary and non-literary texts, as well as in artist’s books. Of special interest are these aspects of the book which resist remediation into the digital form. Finally, the volume contains an extensive section devoted to artistic practice as research, discussing the book as the synthesis of the arts, and site for performative aesthetic activity.

Christin Barbarino, Katarzyna Bazarnik, Christoph Bläsi, Sarah Bodman, Zenon Fajfer, Annette Gilbert, Susanne Gramatzki, Mareike Herbstreit, Viola Hildebrand-Schat, Thomas Hvid Kromann, Monika Jäger, Eva Linhart, Bettina Lockemann, Patrizia Meinert, Bernhard Metz, Sebastian Schmideler, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Christoph Benjamin Schulz, usus (Uta Schneider & Ulrike Stoltz), Anne Thurmann-Jajes, Sakine Weikert, Gabriele Wix

PD Dr. Viola Hildebrand-Schat studied literature, philosophy and psychology (M.A.) and graduated in Art history (postdoctoral lecture qualification). She lectures at Goethe-University/Frankfurt am Main and Lomonosov State University Moscow. She specializes in Contemporary Art. Her publications include papers on artist’s books.

Katarzyna Bazarnik is professor at the Institute of English Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, as well as translator, and curator of Liberature Reading Room. She has published on James Joyce, experimental novel, literary theory, especially liberature, and literary translation.

Christoph Benjamin Schulz, DPhil, is a literary scholar and art historian. Amongst other things, he researches aspects of the materiality and mediality of literary communication.