Paratextual Politics and Practices

Gérard Genette developed the concept of Paratext in which he divided all texts that make a text become a book into either Peritext or Epitext. The Peritext is materially connected to the (printed) book and the category contains e. g. blurb, T. o. C., title, name of the author, preface or epilogue and has already been subject of intense research in the literary sciences. In contrast to that the so called Epitext which contains e. g. interviews, answers to questionnaires, public speeches but also habitual properties which affect the reception of the literary work has not yet been thoroughly researched. In Paratextual Politics and Practices the Epitext is the focal point of all of the contained papers. Genettes paratextual categories and their functions are to be critically reflected and the applicability for specific interests will be argued. It seems that there is consensus in the scientific community that Paratexts and especially Epitexts are fundamental for the constitution of the public image of an author and very important for the reception of disparate texts as parts of a greater literary body of work or uvre. These are reasons why the concept of Paratext is not only usable for the description of text- text-relationships but also a tool to describe the processes involved in constituting modern authorship itself and its dependent social and cultural mechanisms. In view of the varied potential of the concept of the Paratext the publication at hand is divided into a theoretical and a practical section. Five papers are concerned with preliminary excursions of the theoretical premises of the Paratext and strive to give an overview over established paradigms and possible future adjustments to them. The following ten articles are concerned with a historical perspective in which the genesis of auctorial staging of literary work and writing practice is examined. All this is founded on the premise that in slight exaggeration there can be no text without Paratext, thus without Paratexts there are no texts. That is to say that texts are only perceived as an object, when they are communicated to the public as such. The presentation of literary texts follows hereby the laws and dynamics of the struggle for attention in the public sphere as well as the contention with the competition. These strategies of distinction as well as the ability of the Epitext to enforce certain interpretations of texts are to be analyzed thoroughly since it is the precursor for any communication about the texts itself. Paratextual Politics and Practices strives to shed light on the complicated interdependencies of (doing) authorship, the genesis of an uvre and the constitution of literature and its authors.