In Literature’s Borderland. The Problem of Literariness in the Twenty-First-Century Art

Abstract

The dynamic technological development caused recently the occurring of many innovating artistic phenomena that connect attributes of literature and different arts. There are new genres that show some resemblance to literary ones, but bring the artistic and semantic function of language down as well. For example, in digital literature, words are as important as images and sounds – and not a single tool dominates over another. Furthermore, there increasingly appear artistic experiments treating language as an object for processing, mix, deconstruction or generating like a computer programme code. This paper concerns the problem of literariness in these new genres, placed peripherally in regard to customarily comprehended literature. Besides the lingual structure in a piece of work, the context of reading and the strategies of interpretation have been described as well. Literature is transcendent in some way, which means that it is always in a relation with the real world. If so, the existential questions really matter in reading too. Eventually, the literariness can be considered as a quality connected with a few dimensions, like immanent lingual shape of piece, its release and reading context or, finally, system of terms established in specific culture. This conception might react against arbitrary conceptions of the literariness in new art genres. On the other hand, it gives a lot of space for further studies on phenomena appearing in the literature’s borderland.