Unpacking the paratextual dynamics of "the cover and its appendages," for example, Genette distinguishes four book covers: front cover, inside front cover, back cover, and inside back cover (23-32). There is a methodological playfulness to Genette's paradigm of the paratext as he employs an approach that is at once aesthetic, narratological, and bibliographical. The epitext, then, denotes elements "outside" the bound volume-public or private elements such as interviews, reviews, correspondence, diaries etc.-although Genette does comment that "in principle, every context serves as a paratext." (8) The peritext includes elements "inside" the confines of a bound volume-everything between and on the covers, as it were. (That is, not all books contain the same paratextual elements identically arranged.) To convey the core elements of this relationship, Genette formulates a simple algorithm that governs the whole of Paratexts: And if there is a difficulty in following Genette's conception of the paratextual, it is located in this cartographically blurry critical space (or, "threshold") which, for Genette, has no fixed location. This, however, is a tricky terrain to map. Genette is interested in the relationship between books and readers-and, at times, in how other discourses by authors and publishers stand between books and readers. We do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text's presence in the world, its 'reception' and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book. Paratexts 1n2Īlthough there is an intertwined and uncertain spatial and temporal order of a "para" object, the occurrence of a paratextual element is part of the publicisation of the literary work: It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside. A thing in 'para,' moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and outside. something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. 'Para' is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority. Hillis Miller's "The Critic as Host," Genette writes of the polysemy of "para": While Paratexts is a hand list of the above (and other) terms catalogued in Palimpsests, Genette intends "paratext" to communicate the ambiguity of the prefix "para." Drawing on J. But this text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal and other productions, such as an author's name, a title, a preface, illustrations… These accompanying productions, which vary in extent and appearance, constitute what I have called elsewhere the work's paratext…. In the introduction to Paratexts, Genette offers a similar definition:Ī literary work consists, entirely or essentially, of a text, defined (very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance. marginal, infrapaginal, terminal notes epigraphs illustrations blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and many other kinds of secondary signals. The second type is the generally less explicit and more distant relationship that binds the text properly speaking, taken within the totality of the literary work, to what can be called its paratext: a title, a subtitle, intertitles prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords, etc. Paratexts has its origins in Genette's introduction à l'architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979), and in Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982) where Genette develops the term "paratext" in his formulation of "five types of transtextual relationships":
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