When a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence. Not at all literary works make this move, of course, but even for those that do not, my claim is that the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean. Literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate open a new window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms. To name such works, I propose "technotexts," a term that connects the technology that produces texts to the texts' verbal constructions. Technotexts play a special role in transforming literary criticism into a material practice, for they make vividly clear that the issue at stake is nothing less than a full-bodied understanding of literature.