TECHNOLOGIES OF LITERATURE. THE INFLUENCE OF CARRIER ON THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF LITERARY WORKS (Technologie literatury. Wplyw nosnika na forme i funkcje przekazów literackich)

The institution of literature depends on the changeable configurations of technological and social factors, the interaction of which is conditioned by the ultimate shape of the transfers and the forms of literary communication. The author of the paper focuses on the technological side of the problem. His considerations, initiated with the relation between some social practice and its material artifacts, require the anthropological approach which respects the changes of the practice over a span of time. Analysis of literary history carriers in a broad perspective allows to present the contemporary changes of literature influenced by electronic media not as its end, but as an element of a certain process it is a subject of, and which it coproduces. Referring in the analysis to the concept remediation, the history of shaping the contemporary (typographical) model of literature is here divided into five stages (portable carriers, the codex form, print, print development, and book for masses). Ultimately, in the technological perspective, the author discusses new, electronic forms of literature.