Get Out of My Sandbox

This chapter considers how one may use Genette's concepts of paratext and hypertext within transmedia narratives and born-digital texts and explores how Web publication problematizes standard ideas of authorship and copyright. This challenges our concepts of originality and our understanding of what constitutes the text and what stands outside it. This chapter explores Nick Montfort's “Taroko Gorge,” a born-digital poem, and Jasper Fforde's “The Eyre Affair,” analyzed as a transmedia narrative, within the framework of Genette's theories of “paratext” and “hypertext.” This chapter highlights the difficulty of reconciling the intellectual and political necessity of a world in which data is freely shared with the practical concern of how the producers of creative work can make a living.

Melodrama Remediated

This chapter reconsiders some tenets of Genette's insightful framework for analyzing paratexts, by examining the transformation of paratexts on one kind of published play—a cheaper, nineteenth-century, English-language “Acting Edition”—after remediation into digital form for new purposes: not for producing theatre, but for studying old drama. Invoking Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dion Boucicault plays as examples of general patterns, the author first fill in gaps in the inventory of print paratexts, delineating a species of theatrical paratext different from the literary paratexts spotlighted by Genette, that, together with the publisher's commercial communications, referred away from the single author or drama and rendered the publication into a hybrid literary-practical commodity. Moving to the twenty-first century, the chapter touches briefly on the pre-digital academic publishing formats, print anthologies and facsimile microform, which involved paratextual and market practices variously inherited by digital successors. While acknowledging the diverse array of digitized playbooks, the chapter concentrates on the proprietary database Literature Online produced by the Chadwyck-Healey division of a conglomerate corporation ProQuest, couching the remediated play paratexts within shifts in global capitalism. These for-profit paratexts partly reveal their political economy basis in fusion with the ideologies of the academic market and the materiality of their medium, including a new species of partly visible protocols that the author calls actuating marks. Overall, the chapter uses old melodrama to open new views of the performances of paratexts across textual media and embedded in political economy.

Post-Book Paratext

The earliest artifacts of expression, represented by cave art and carved statuettes, had a paratext of their own that surrounded and supported their significance. However, there is a fundamental difference between the way these artifacts operated in society and the way writing and print operate. Writing and print are associated with a “print culture” centered on fixity, social isolation, and authority. This opposes a preceding emphasis on orality, fluidity, and social communication. However, the hegemony of print culture has been challenged by the binary revolution. The widespread success of e-readers, apps, the Web, and electronic reading in general indicates a nascent post-book era. The essential difference between a paper book and its electronic analog is the stripping of the former's paratextual elements. This chapter suggests that we should be deliberate about designing the paratext of our digital post-book experiences. We have the opportunity to reintroduce elements of pre-print orality, continuing what scholars have noted as the development of a “secondary orality” instigated by radio and television. An entire profession already exists whose mission is to design and implement platform-specific elements that attend to the delivery of content: interaction designers. These professionals can help us design the future of reading.

Video Game Framings

This chapter discusses the applicability of the concept of ‘paratext' (as coined by Gérard Genette) to audio-visual media in general and to video games in particular. In the first section, some potential elements of a video game's ‘paratext' are singled out by means of ‘auto-ethnographic' description of the introductory sequence(s) of the first-person shooter game BioShock Infinite. Several segments of the game's ‘threshold' are differentiated employing a rather tentative ad-hoc terminology. In the second section, Genette's definitional stipulations, posing the point of reference for everyone actually using the term ‘paratext,' are reconstructed, clarified and constructively criticized. Here, the author also discusses potential objections to Genette's definitional criteria and briefly touches upon some media-theoretical constraints of his approach. Ensuing from these meta-terminological considerations, the author turns to the questionable use of ‘paratext' in video game studies. As critical examination reveals, the terminology in this field of research is rather vaguely connected to, and sometimes even completely detached from, Genette's definition. As an objection to such redefinitions of the term, the chapter suggests (1) that its use be restricted to communicative signals meeting the following criteria only: (a) functionally subservient to (which obviously implies specifically referring to) ‘the game proper,' (b) authorized by entitled members of the game's production collective, (c) verbal, (d) (at least partly) extra-diegetic. Additionally, (2) the chapter proposes supplementing ‘paratext' as an analytical tool with the higher-order umbrella term ‘framings' (as coined by Werner Wolf).

The Pornographic Paratexts of Pornhub

“The Pornographic Paratexts of Pornhub” analyses the evolving paratextual elements of the popular porn site Pornhub and considers how its evolving virtual frames interact with the visual texts it displays—online porn films. Engaging with Gérard Genette's Paratexts, some fundamental aspects of this late-twentieth-century paratextual theory are reconceptualised in this contemporary, sexually explicit digital environment. Pornhub is considered in relation to its maturing paratextual elements. Despite the virtual amorphousness and (para)textual porousness of the digital environment—the relevant relationships between text, epitext, peritext and intertext, though clearly delineated with regard to the printed book, become more blurred in a virtual space of infinite, hyperlinked pages—Pornhub has developed numerous tangible frames and stable paratextual features since its emergence in 2007. Given the rigid political, judicial and media conception of what online porn films constitute, it is important to consider the possibility that monolithically negative definitions of filmic pornography may derive not from the hardcore content itself, but from the way in which the films are framed online. How, then, do the paratexts of Pornhub interact with and affect users' reading of the films displayed? In this chapter, individual films from the site are descriptively analysed in relation both to how these visual pornographic texts are influenced by their paratext and how paratextual theory is complicated and renewed through this application.

Paratexts and Documentary Practices

The formal literature of science has traditionally acted as a “ledger” where debts are acknowledged, previous works are cited, and advances in knowledge are claimed. Recent innovation in electronic publishing, as well as open access requirements from funding agencies in the life sciences, is making it possible to examine this ledger more closely: we can now more definitively ask who is acknowledged, where do citations appear, and what knowledge is claimed within an entire discipline, journal or archive of publications. In this chapter, the authors explore the ledger of bioinformatics, asking how two paratexts—acknowledgment and authorship statements—can be used to understand credit and collaboration within this unique field.

The Context of Paratext

Based on two sets of data consisting of research articles from Web of Science, analyses were made on articles citing Genette and articles using the paratext concept. The purpose was to investigate the context in which the paratext concept is used and Genette is cited by analyzing the journals and research fields in which the articles were published, the literature these articles are based on, and the terminology used in the articles. This chapter presents the results, which show both close connections and similarities in citation patterns, namely, to literature studies and to the humanities in general. It is also possible to see signs of an increased interest in digital media and a widening of cultural expressions studied within the realm of the humanities, such as computer games, while Genette and paratextual theories are used to a much lesser extent in the social sciences. In addition to the empirical study, the relation between paratext studies and bibliometrics is briefly discussed.

Mashup as Paratextual Practice

The main objective of this chapter is to contribute to a more dynamic understanding of the notion of paratext (Genette, 1997a). The author argues that in order to fully grasp the discourse of contemporary media objects, one has to focus on the networked, hyperconnective and fluid nature of today's media environments (Jenkins, 2008; Varnelis, 2008), where content itself often seems secondary to the modes of its circulation. In this regard, the concept of paratext still provides a valuable framework of analysis, especially when related to the widespread programming and coding procedures of contemporary Web services. In order to enable such a dynamic understanding of the notion in the contemporary digital media environment, Genette's proposition should be read not only (or primarily) as relating to the set of subtexts, “parasitic” texts, annotations and markers accompanying the “main” text, but first and foremost as a semiotic-technological apparatus enabling the circulation of digital content across different media platforms. Such a re-reading also calls for an updated understanding of digital media, with more prominence given to the relational characteristics of the objects, as well as to the fluidity and dynamics of the processes of circulation, rather than to digital “objects” as such.

Ebooks and the Digital Paratext

Since its publication in 1987, Gérard Genette's Paratexts has provided a productive means for engaging with those peripheral texts that frame, present, and bound a central work. However, advances in digital media and, in particular, the increasing prevalence of the ebook have altered or replaced many of the conventions outlined by Genette in Paratexts. This chapter explores these new paratextual conventions, employing case studies drawn from the “front lines” of the ebook revolution in concert with more recent scholarship in the field of paratextual studies. By examining the recent development of ebooks through the lens of the five paratextual dimensions outlined by Genette—spatial, temporal, substantial, pragmatic, and functional—this chapter argues that Paratexts continues to offer a crucial tool for the interpretation of texts in a new digital milieu.

Bridging The Unknown

This chapter presents a dual perspective on the paratextual apparatus of a work of electronic literature, The Unknown: The Original Great American Hypertext Novel by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, and Frank Marquardt. Approaches from literature studies and information science are combined to offer qualitative content analyses and close readings of the table of contents, titular apparatus, comments hidden in the source code, and other paratextual elements, in relation to the narrative. Findings indicate that the work's paratextual content presents inconsistencies and contradictions, both in terms of the use of the paratextual structure and of the information conveyed. The paratextual elements are analyzed through the lens of Gérard Genette's theory, as outlined in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, in order to gauge their role and efficiency as identifiers, organizational components, and information providers, as well as their literary effect. The value of the theory as an interdisciplinary tool is also discussed.