10 Examples of Paratextuality

Paratextuality

The paratextuality It is the set of elements that frames a literary work. For example, the title and the epilogue are paratexts.

Paratextuality is a category of transtextuality, which is everything that relates a text to others or to the outside world. The concepts of transtextuality and paratextuality were coined by Gérard Genette, a literary critic, in his work Palimpsests: literature in the second grade.

The elements of paratextuality are fundamental to understand a literary work, since they indicate possible reading meanings, they serve to guide to readers, determine how a text should be read, add pertinent information, establish contact with other cultural elements, among others.

There are two types of paratextuality:

Examples of paratextuality

1. Mark Twain. It is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and means "mark two", an expression that was used in navigation.
2. Novel note The exam by Julio Cortázar: “Today I publish this old story because I inevitably like its free language, its fable without moral, his Buenos Aires melancholy, and also because the nightmare where he was born is still awake and walks through the streets ”. With this note the author establishes an introduction and a possible reading of the text: it has no moral and the melancholic tone of the book is highlighted.
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3. "Critical note of Juan María Gutiérrez" of the story The slaughterhouse by Esteban Echeverría when we have the information. This text was published, along with the story, several years after the author died. This text describes how Echeverría's story should be read: as a testimony of the time portrayed in the story, that is, as a realistic story.
4. The Buendía family tree. This family tree was included in the commemorative edition of the novel One hundred years of loneliness by Gabriel García Márquez and serves to guide the reader in reading the novel, since it tells the stories of many characters from that family.
5. "Letter to Don José Zoilo Miguens". This letter was published in 1872 together with The gaucho Martín Fierro, a narrative poem written by José Hernández. The letter guides the reader as to how the text should be read: as a faithful representation of the gaucho's life and as a truthful text, even though it is fictional.
6. "To the victims of waiting" is the dedication of the book Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto when we have the information. This dedication works as a paratext for the novel because it indicates one of the central themes of the novel: waiting for her as the organizer of the protagonist's life.
7. "Ah! The infinite selfishness of adolescence, / studious optimism: how full of / flowers was the world that summer! The / airs and forms dying… ”. This quote belongs to the poet Arthur Rimbaud and is the epigraph of the Complete poetry scored by Alejandra Pizarnik when we have the information. This section guides the reader as to how the poetry in this book can be read: it is necessary to have note that Pizarnik's writing can be understood as a break with the traditional forms of the poetry.
8. “The novel Memories posthumous by Brás Cubas —which we publish in a new translation— inaugurates the most committed and less conventional stage of his work. Written at the end of the 19th century, it nevertheless maintains a striking freshness: its corrosive humor - which at times borders on the cynicism - and their irony resonate with the 21st century reader with the same intensity as if they had been conceived contemporaneously ”. This text is a fragment of the back cover of Posthumous memoirs de Brás Cubas de Machados de Assis. The texts on the back cover usually guide the reading because they give a brief synopsis of the content of the literary text and because they mention the importance and characteristics of the author's style.
9. "Dr. Jekyll and Edward Hyde, transformed" by Jorge Luis Borges. In this short essay the author reviews a film that is a transposition of Stevenson's story. This essay serves as the epitext of the story, because its structure, its characters and the way it is told is analyzed. In addition, the importance of this story for universal literature is named.
10. "Represent" of The words and the things by Michael Focault. In this chapter of the book the author raises a possible reading about Don Quijote of La Mancha in relation to signs, the representation of language and objects in the world of fiction. This text functions as the epitext of the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, because a different way of approaching it is established.

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