Paratext

8 Key excerpts on "Paratext"

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  Comedy and Social Science

  Towards a Methodology of Funny

  • Cate Watson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 Writing for Publication The Importance of the Paratext DOI: 10.4324/9781315731407-7

  INTRODUCTION

  Getting published is a primary concern for the social scientist. While this is a long-established academic practice, it has been given added impetus with today’s emphasis on performance management driven by various forms of research assessment. This chapter examines the Paratextual practices that surround academic publishing, aiming to raise awareness of the importance of the production of texts in order to inform the writing practices of the humorously inclined academic who aspires to increased impact.

  1

  The para-text is what announces the text to the world:

  Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: title, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers’ jacket copy are part of a book’s private and public history.

  So writes an anonymous hand on the back cover of Gerard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation (1997). The Paratext, Genette says, is ‘a “vestibule” that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back’ (p. 2). The importance of the Paratext in writing and publishing research is often overlooked by academics, many of whom naïvely imagine that their ideas are communicated in pristine and unmediated form via texts and that they themselves remain uninfluenced by Paratextual practices. Publishers are often, with good reason, frustrated at academics’ recalcitrance in this respect. Many academics, it seems, regard the process of giving birth to the text as the end of their responsibilities, leaving the swaddling to others and failing to recognize that the publication system is not a neutral conduit for knowledge

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  The Art of Ana Clavel

  Ghosts, Urinals, Dolls, Shadows and Outlaw Desires

  • JaneElizabeth Lavery(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Paratextuality refers to those literary and printerly ‘thresholds’ which mediate between book, author, publisher, and reader and comprises liminal devices and conventions which lie within the book, the so-called ‘peritext’, and outside it, the ‘epitext’ (Genette, p. 5). Book covers, back cover blurbs, epigraphs, titles of books, font styles, layout, and visual media are all examples of the peritext. Those elements which reside outside the text and form part of the private and public history of the book, such as marketing campaigns or interviews, are referred to as the epitext. Whilst both features are equally important in relation to the book’s overall Paratextual dimension, this chapter will focus, for reasons of space, on the peritextual devices surrounding the presentation of Clavel’s novella.

  Peritextuality might appear to have little bearing on one’s interpretation of the text in hand, yet it is a ‘fringe’ of ‘the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’ (Philippe Lejeune quoted in Genette, p. 2). For Genette, this edge represents:

  the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that […] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies). (Paratexts, p. 2)

  Peritextuality, which acts as the interface between (potential) reader and text, is important for framing our expectations and interpretations of the text in hand as well as prompting us to step into the text itself.4 Ultimately peritextuality is as significant as the text itself in how it mediates between the reader and the text (Harris, p. 2). Although peritextual elements are frequently intended by authors, illustrators, and publishers to frame the reader’s expectations and interpretations, the way in which a reader decodes the peritext of the book is an individual affair. Whilst peritextuality can serve to anchor our interpretation, it also serves to disrupt interpretations, to create ambiguity or sense of dislocation (Harris, p. 6). Each time more information is revealed through the peritext, the (prospective) reader finds him- or herself having to modify his or her predictions about what the book might be about and to accommodate multiple perspectives.5 The strong reactions that the image of Las Violetas

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  Translation and Paratexts

  • Kathryn Batchelor(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 p.17

  If readers are frustrated by the lengthy and at times contradictory answer to the simple question of what a Paratext is, it might be as well to stress that the complexity of the response is in some senses a necessary part of the Paratext’s very definition. To try to define the Paratext is always to negotiate around its blurry borders, both inward-facing (towards the text) and outward-facing (towards the broader context). While some elements can be relatively clearly and unambiguously identified as part of the Paratext, others sit less comfortably within its parameters. Genette himself stresses this point on numerous occasions,10 but also cautions against allowing the indeterminacy of the boundaries to lead to an expansion of the Paratext’s domain:

  One of the methodological hazards attendant on a subject as multiform and tentacular as the Paratext, it seems to me, is the imperialist temptation to annex to this subject everything that comes within its reach . . . Inasmuch as the Paratext is a transitional zone between text and beyond-text, one must resist the temptation to enlarge this zone by whittling away in both directions.

  407

  The key to resisting this temptation, for Genette, is to insist on the function of the Paratext as being ‘to ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author’s purpose’ (407). While it is possible to appreciate Genette’s reasons for wishing to contain the Paratext, his insistence on a link to authorial intention creates significant contradictions at the heart of the notion of the Paratext, as I have argued above. An alternative way of demarcating the Paratext, more compatible with translation contexts, will be proposed in Part III. In the remainder of this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the essentials of Genette’s typology and, in a final section, outline the place that he envisages for translation within his framework.

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  Novel horizons

  The genre making of Restoration fiction

  • Gerd Bayer(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  12 Both Mander and Berger, tellingly, discuss textual traditions that developed in the absence of formal or official poetological debates. For such literary developments, the transitory nature of Paratextual generic debate – nurturing readerly expectations and competences at a moment that witnessed formal or thematic innovations – clearly plays a significant role.

  This impression is confirmed by the situation of narrative prose fictions during the English Restoration. The chapters in this second part of Novel horizons outline how this interaction played out. They are built on the assumption that Paratexts provide a frame and meeting ground for, on the one hand, authorial discussions of innovation and, on the other, readerly expectations and competence. In offering a ‘conflation of self and text’,13 Paratextual poetics testify to changing generic norms and envision the future developments within narrative prose fictions. This Part II , accordingly, opens with a brief survey of the changing literary landscape of Restoration England (Chapter 3 ), which argues that the period’s unique historical environment provided the nurturing ground for the development of experimentations within narrative prose fictions. It furthermore shows (Chapter 4 ) that the focus on Paratextual poetics did not develop within prose narratives alone but also formed a substantial tradition within dramatic texts, initiated by the reopening of the theatres after the Restoration and the subsequent changes in terms of venue, audience, generic form, and social status. In this climate of shifting allegiances and changing forms, narrative prose fiction also underwent a substantial process of reorientation that was communicated to readers through the Paratextual apparatus. Part II accordingly closes with a detailed analysis (Chapter 5 ) of these Paratextual poetics of prose fiction that shows the range of innovations and the explicit nature in which authors, publishers, and others discussed them. Providing a generation of readers with a frame for decoding a plethora of texts, the Paratextual apparatus of Restoration prose fictions, this final chapter to Part II

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  Message and Medium

  English Language Practices Across Old and New Media

  • Caroline Tagg, Mel Evans, Caroline Tagg, Mel Evans(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  12  Paratextual presentation of Christopher St German’s Doctor and Student 1528–1886

  Mari-Liisa Varila

  University of Turku , Department of English , FI-20014 , University of Turku, Turku , Finland

  Sirkku Ruokkeinen

  University of Turku , Department of English , FI-20014 , University of Turku, Turku , Finland

  Aino Liira

  University of Turku , Department of English , FI-20014 , University of Turku, Turku , Finland

  Matti Peikola

  University of Turku , Department of English , FI-20014 , University of Turku, Turku , Finland

  12.1  Presenting text through Paratext

  The concept of Paratext (Genette 1997 ) refers to the elements that present, explain, and promote the book or text. Paratextual elements can be divided into two categories based on their location: peritextual elements are found within the book itself (e.g. prefaces, tables of contents); epitextual material is related to the book but outside it (e.g. reviews, advertisements). The verbal and visual forms of Paratext are re-shaped historically vis-à-vis the changing cultural, medial and technological processes by which texts are made available to readers in a given period or community (e.g. Genette 1997 : 3; Chartier 2014 : 135–149; Ruokkeinen & Liira 2017 [2019] ). Hence, the functions of Paratext may be characterised in various ways depending on the period and medium.

  Building on Genette’s foundational conceptualisation of Paratext, Birke and Christ (2013) propose three major functions for how Paratextual items mediate the reader’s contact with the text: navigational (assisting the reader in “operating” the text in its material context), interpretive (guiding the reader’s interpretation of the text), and commercial (inviting the reader to purchase the text or some other product related to it). In Ciotti and Lin’s (2016 : vii) threefold model, the structuring and commenting functions roughly correspond to Birke and Christ’s navigational and interpretive functions. Instead of the commercial dimension, however, Ciotti and Lin (2016 : vii–viii) – who focus on manuscript Paratexts – highlight the documenting

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  Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Context

  • Roderick McConchie, Jukka Tyrkkö, Roderick McConchie, Jukka Tyrkkö(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  for whom . For the reasons behind lexicographic policies and practices, we must look beyond the text to the prefaces, dedications, appendices, and archival sources such as letters, lectures, or notebooks.

  These sources, labelled by Gerard Genette (1997) as ‘Paratexts’, are easily overlooked and yet they may contain something that every researcher yearns for: the direct voice of the lexicographer and an insight into the interconnections which dictionaries and their compilers had with their co-creators, publishers, readership, and society in general. For Genette, Paratexts are those ‘liminal devices and conventions’ both within the book (‘peritexts’ such as dedications, title pages, signs of authorship, forewords, prefaces, epilogues, and appendices) and outside the book (‘epitexts’ such as authorial correspondence, oral confidences, diaries, and pretexts).179 Paratextual sources often bring a book to life and connect us (the readers) with the human and historical aspects of the text, influencing our perceptions, interpretations, and knowledge. Hence they can also function as powerful tools to influence the views of readers and to shape the image of a text. The main focus of this paper will be the peritexts of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED

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  Reading the Liturgy

  An Exploration of Texts in Christian Worship

  • Juliette J. Day(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  12 etc. All of these, apart from ‘notes’, do contain texts to be used in the liturgical event, but are not presented in a manner which facilitates that, functioning rather as a compendium of variable liturgical units.

  Having, I hope, drawn your attention to the extent of the Paratextual material surrounding liturgical texts, which has been placed there by the intentional actions of the publisher and author, we turn to consider how they function as a communication between author and reader, even though they hopefully do not form any part of the communication between worshippers.

  Authors and readers

  Genette asks us to consider the ‘situation of communication’ which at the very least operates at the level of the title of the book,13 but then operates more generally every time a Paratextual element directs the reader towards a particular use of a liturgical text. In Chapter 2 we discussed what ‘authorship’ might mean in relation to liturgical texts, and in liturgical books we note that Paratextual declarations of authority and authorization demonstrate once more the diffused way in which authorship is attributed. All Common Worship volumes carry a prominent page (a right page with prominent ‘level 1’ title) called ‘Authorization’ which lists the authorities for the contents of each book (the Book of Common Prayer, General Synod, or the House of Bishops) and reminds the (unidentified) reader of the restrictions placed upon the local church under Canon B3.14 The ASB , however, did not use roman numerals and the pagination surely began with the half-title page, although the first number is on the page containing publication information presented as ‘4/History ’ (original italics). Here there is no attempt to separate text from Paratext by numerical means. The ‘Authorization’ appears in very small typeface, on a left-page, at page 8; what might be the ‘situation of communication’ here? We could surmise that in 1980 the ‘sender’ (the Bishops, General Synod or the Liturgical Commission) assumed that the unnamed recipient would not need to be reminded of Canon B3; whereas in 2000 the sender quite obviously knew that the implied readers would need to be so reminded. This would seem to be confirmed by the additional presence in Common Worship: Services and Prayers of the legal formula of the ‘Declaration of Assent’ made by all in recognized ministries at ordination or licensing; the Declaration concludes, ‘and in public prayer and administration of the sacraments, I will use only the forms of service which are authorized or allowed by Canon’.15

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  Jin Ping Mei English Translations

  Texts, Paratexts and Contexts

  • Lintao Qi(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In contrast to the near absence of annotations in Egerton’s LOTUS, in PLUM, Roy makes recourse to a wide spectrum of Paratextual forms: in the first translated volume, for instance, there is a scholarly introduction, a cast of characters including 1,110 entries, two appendixes – one giving the translator’s commentary on the prologue of the ST, the other, the translation of supplementary material. Most impressive of all, Roy furnishes his twenty chapters of translation with hundreds of extensive endnotes. At the end of the book, two other sections usually to be found in academic works are also included: bibliography and index.

  All in all, the Paratextual elements account for nearly half of the 700 plus page volume. As the threshold of interpretation (Genette, 1997), Paratexts inform the readers’ expectation, and in doing so, they ‘shape the reading strategies’ that the readers will take with them ‘“into” the text’; and indeed, for some readers who know of a text only at the Paratextual level, Paratexts become ‘the very stuff’ upon which interpretation is based (Gray, 2010, p. 26). Paratext is probably the most versatile element in a given book, it ‘primes, explains, contextualises, justifies and through beautification, tempts’ (Pellatt, 2013, p. 3). In a similar vein, Kovala (1996, p. 135) summarises the two ‘macro-functions’ of Paratexts as ‘to inform and influence the reader’. In the next section, I explore the scope and style of the Paratextual regime in Roy’s PLUM.

  Table 4.1  Paratextual apparatus in the first volume of PLUM by Roy

  Item	no. of pages	% of the whole book
  Half-title page and contents	9	1.3%
  List of illustrations	1	0.1%
  Illustrations	40	5.6%
  Acknowledgements	3	0.4%
  Introduction	32	4.5%
  Cast of characters	56	7.8%
  Appendix I	8	1.1%
  Appendix II	11	1.5%
  Notes	94	13.2%
  Bibliography	30	4.2%
  Index	38	5.3%
  Other (endpaper, etc.)	6	0.8%
  Total pages of Paratexts	328	45.9%
  Total pages of volume I	714	100%

  Paratextual features of PLUM

  It took a decade for Roy to finish the translation of the first twenty chapters of JPM, which was published in 1993 ‘to rave reviews’ (Schuessler, 2013). The whole project was not completed until another twenty years later, when the fifth and final volume of his PLUM eventually came out in 2013. In this section, I investigate, in connection with Roy’s various forms of capital, some of the major Paratextual features of PLUM, namely, the titles, cast of characters, annotations and illustrations.

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