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This essay closely examines the (sub-)paratext and (sub-)paratextual narrative in We Three ( 《我们仨》) by Yang Jiang in an attempt to reveal the different roles (sub-)paratext and its narrative play in different places and its special functions in We Three. Following a theoretical discussion of paratext by Gerard Genette, the authors argue that (sub-)paratext and (sub-)paratextual narrative, whether subordinate or not, not only play a crucial role in the works like We Three, but also offer a crystal lens by which both the style and meaning of the text proper could be revealed in a different way. The effect and function of the (sub-)paratext in We Three lie in three aspects, namely, to tell more telling stories or add additional information, to complement the main narrative text, and/or to help reveal deep feelings and family ties with more stylistic variations. Indeed, a close examination into We Three reveals that the (sub-)paratext and the narrative embedded in the (sub-)paratext as typically seen in the three appendices of We Three turn out to be more important than the 'text' and 'textual narrative' proper even to the extent that the table turned at once, i.e. the text paratextualized and the paratext textualized. The change of the roles the textual narrative and paratextual narrative play, as best exemplified in Appendix One of We Three, in the final analysis, forms a unique narrative strategy in Yang Jiang's autobiographic narrative in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our essay charts out the pedagogical, technological, operational, institutional, commercial, and theoretical implications of moving from a print-based casebook paradigm to an electronic course book model. Central to this venture is what we call the Conceptions Course Book (CCB), the law school course book of the future. That e-book is, as we discuss, the end product of an entirely new and sophisticated process of creating and distributing materials (textual, audio-visual, and interactive) to be used in law school courses. This process allows professors to develop (in an I-Tunes-like manner) their own custom-designed course books in efficient, economical, and innovative ways best suited to their pedagogical concerns. Unlike proposals for computer-based e-books, our CCB would be designed to take advantage of the unique opportunities offered by more advanced versions of e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, or Apple’s I-Pad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “examens” that accompany Corneille’s dramatic opus are in fact, adjuvants, written after the fact. As defensive meta-commentaries wherein the focus rarely departs from an attempt to demonstrate how his plays do or do not conform to theoretical prescriptions, they are prefaces in name only: publishers have tended to displace them in advance of the work despite their “belated” appearance relative to the work. Displacement is, however, not to be overlooked. For if the pasted additives known as the “examens” suffer at the level of insightful texts, they do adopt significance as paratexts. In his extra textual writings, Corneille the theaterician and Corneille the theoretician jockey for discursive supremacy, and it is ultimately the theaterician who emerges victorious. The more he reviews his plays, the more muted becomes the voice of the disciplined theoretician, and conversely, the more assertive the voice of the theaterician. Shortly after Rodogune, it will be noted that Corneille becomes more eager to defend rather than condemn his creative instincts, and less hesitant to criticize the rules themselves. Corneille’s decision not to engage in a theoretical examination of his final works suggests that at the end of his career, as at the beginning, Corneille believed his primary commitment was to his own aesthetic vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Our study draws on the array of functions assigned to the textual Coda in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, also turned into a successful movie. It follows two diverging narrative discourses—the Text and its Paratext—that overtly compete over the understanding of the story and over its reading transaction. In McEwan’s novel, the closing Paratext provides genre patterns and alternative reading strategies to the Text. Turning back upon the story itself and upon its process of writing, its understanding and its genre expectations in a particular cultural context, Coda is being assigned by the British novelist an overt meta-narrative task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Neohelicon is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

J.J. Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844) is a parody of nineteenth-century utopianism. One of the themes that the artist and his anonymous collaborator (the author Taxile Delord) are interested in exploring is the way in which the public’s desire to contemplate and, indeed, to possess visions of alternative modes of existence had led to the commodification of utopianism in their day. In the book, the artists’ use of parody shows how the products of the imagination occasion a series of derivatives not unlike––and often rigorously identical to––the paratext. I will argue that these paratextual elements are places where the text’s discourse is transformed and assigned a “use value.” But how, exactly, does Grandville use parody to reveal––and to undermine––this derivative function of the para- and the meta-textual? And what can this tell us about the proliferation of paratextual hermeneutics in our day? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Neohelicon is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article investigates the textual embedding of epigraphs in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While it had long been customary to use a Latin or Greek quote on title pages, many British and French Romantics went further, placing one or several mottoes at the beginning of each chapter or poem. From an intertextual perspective, these quotes are indexical traces of absent texts. The paratextual dialogue, this article’s main focus, rather involves equally present elements (motto and title, motto and chapter, motto and motto). As a form of commentary, epigraphs shed light on the text they accompany, thus operating in a convergent manner, but their divergent potential should not be underestimated: instead of helping us plod through the plot, mottoes can lead us astray, much like unreliable narrators. Taken as a whole, they form a parallel text, an alternative narrative, where writers sometimes allow themselves to develop a different, paradoxical, poetics. The above-mentioned issues are illustrated with examples from Stendhal, whose Red and Black, arguably the most playful and ironic example of “motto-mania” in French Romantic literature, is reread in light of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation. The zero degree of translational invisibility occurs in utilitarian prose that is designed simply to convey information. But the minimal way for a book to make translation visible is to identify the name of the translator, on the title page if not on the cover and spine. A long tradition of translator’s prefaces further undercuts the illusion of unmediated contact with a pure, primal text. So, too, do the memoirs of translators. Second-degree translations can both display and conceal the derivative nature of the final text. If there are reasons—such as vanity or commerce—to disguise a text’s origins in translation, there are also reasons for pseudo-translations, texts that falsely claim to be translations. More than just an appendix to an Englishing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a poet’s tribute to the power of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the modifications of certain paratextual information in a given territory and period, i.e., before, within and after the years of transition in Hungary, around 1989. After a short comparison between the legal and literary concepts of paratext, some examples are given of what paratexts in a specific period (under given circumstances) may mean, what implications they may have, and in what way they govern interpretations. These traits, it is argued, can be connected to the ruling ideological (or even political) considerations of a highly controlled literary communication, characteristics of the pre-1989 “Socialist” countries of East and Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the roles of paratexts in the translations of several Haitian novels as a basis for re-visioning the paratext in my own translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Les Rapaces (1986). I suggest that paratexts often play a colonizing role in relation to the texts they present through the generalized assumption that the purpose of paratexts is to facilitate access to a foreign language and culture. By examining the functioning of paratexts in several previous translations of Haitian literature, I reveal the colonizing effect of conventional paratexts, and begin to imagine a decolonized paratext for The Raptors. I propose that a more critical role for the paratext of a translation is to draw attention to the translated nature of the text, the resistance and opacity of its linguistic and cultural differences, and the process of negotiation, exchange, and travel on which the translation depends. This strategy is in line with a feminist critique of the limited repertoires for relating to difference offered by masculine epistemologies and promotes an activist feminist agenda through literary re-presentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Neohelicon is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Neohelicon is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Neohelicon is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

“The Supreme Court”, first published in 1987, is a concise and informative narrative of the highest court in the USA. It contains much that is of interest and probing about the court and the intrigues of its decision-making. Moments abound when the reader is taken on a journey through the humanity of the cases, the erudite corridors of high-law and into the intensely high-strung but level-headed hallowed chambers of the Justices and Justice. What is revealed is the exacting mask of law, the humanity and affectations of those whose burden it is to deliver far reaching judgment on the American people. However, more revealing of the storyline is, perhaps, not so much the woven narratives contained within the three pages of text as it is the peripheral story (what Gerard Genette called the ‘paratext’) unfolded in the cover wraps, what they contain and the stories they weave. In this paper, I examine the liminal devices of ‘ The Supreme Court’. I argue that much of the systemic cognition of the legal system can be divined from a scholarly encounter with these elements. Furthermore, the paratexts of two editions of the book indicate a paradigmatic shift in the legal perception of both the Supreme Court and the author between the periods of publication. This underscores the law not only in its reactive form but also in its dexterity in shifting its position to reflect the reality of its time. On each occasion, it alters the legal consciousness of a nation. Yet, it stays remarkably stable and self-effacing. The essential question is one of deference. It is of great interest that the Chief Justice targets the informed and the interested as opposed to the ignorant and ambivalent. The liminal devices, I observe, are probably as eloquent with this message as the text within. The paratext bears testimony to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paratexts, especially forewords, have an unenviable task of introducing the text to follow to the readers but doing so without closing off meanings or containing the text in a limiting paradigm, preventing the readers from reaching new/alternative readings. This task is especially problematic in the case of thinkers like Foucault who was keenly aware of the disciplining, if not punishing, features of established genres and the inevitable struggles over power/knowledge they create. It is therefore especially interesting to analyze how Foucault himself deals with the need to define his own volatile ideas, for a translated edition of his work. The present paper seeks to compare the two paratexts, foreword to the English translation and attached to the English translation of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. The analysis will, first, look at the discursive features of the two texts, analyzing how the specific choices made in the paratexts define, frame and contain the work that follows. The analysis will be placed in a Foucauldian frame, comparing the discourses employed in the paratexts to the orders of discourse as defined by Foucault, primarily the author-function and the contradictory role of the commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to assess modes and functions of paratexts drawing on music. The article examines paratextuality in relation to the phenomenon of intermediality, and more precisely the concept of musicalization of fiction. By analyzing paratexts taken from twentieth-century and contemporary novels, it argues that musicalized paratexts have specific implications, both in terms of their characteristics and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gérard Genette’s study of paratext, a primarily synchronic and taxonomic approach, is predicated upon the assumption that there is a neat border between what we can classify as text and the elements we can group together under the heading of paratext. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the relationship between these two elements is more complicated than Genette suggests. Not only is the term paratext itself saddled with a potentially limitless number of elements, but the way that these elements interact with texts cannot be reduced to a uniform border that applies in all cases. Can we continue to talk about paratext once we have acknowledged its potentially limitless proliferation and the fuzzy border it shares with text; and if so, how does this affect the way we talk about text? This paper will suggest that to answer these questions we should refocus the concept of paratext from a synchronic to a diachronic approach. Such an approach, moving away from a pure taxonomy of spatially oriented categories, enables us to examine the way that literary works are represented over time. By focusing on Victorian serialised fiction, a form of the novel preoccupied with the temporal framework of its own production, it is possible to explore the complex relationship between text and paratext. At the same time, by examining this relationship in the context of different ideas of duration, such as the notions of kairos and chronos used by Frank Kermode, this paper will suggest a theoretical framework for relating an understanding of text and paratext to the figure of the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author ponders on the use of paratexts. He considers the attempts of narratologists to restrict, restrain, rename, recast, re-code, rebirth the foundation of the paratextual. He explains why the paratext has been bounded. He believes research enterprise assumes the visage of factitiousness, if not of avoidance.