MERE (MAJOR) NOTES: 

Paratextual Guise in 20th and
21st C. Literature 

Paratextual guise is the practice of feigning paratextuality – of mimicking the bibliographic formatting that typically signals paratextuality – but including information in those spaces that is not conceptually paratextual.  Paratexts are everything that surround, extend, and present some other, main text.  These include titles, authors’ names, illustrations, tables of contents, stamps/copyright pages, introductions, footnotes, endnotes, appendices, indices, and all other supplemental materials.  A key text for my dissertation is Gérard Genette’s foundational study of paratexts called Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.  As Genette theorizes, a paratext’s defining feature is its subordinate status; it exists to serve some other, principal text (“Introduction” 265, 269; Paratexts 13).  That principal text is given priority over the paratext, by definition.  

Instances of paratextual guise, however, are verbal or other productions that look like paratext but are not paratext by definition, because they contain information that is not subordinate.  As Genette writes, paratext is “a fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary, discourse devoted to the service of something else which constitutes its right of existence, namely the text” (“Introduction” 269).  Paratextual guise highlights the flaw in such a design by parodying the paratext-text hierarchical relationship.  Examples of paratextual guise include the foreword, endnotes, and index in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the footnotes in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the editor’s foreword and footnotes in Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, to name a few.    

Why would an author choose paratextual guise as a means of communicating narrative?  What effect is achieved when paratextual forms are mimicked?  I argue that paratextual guise is a particular narrative-resource that allows for the exploitation of readers’ and writers’ associations with paratexts in order to deconstruct various systems of power upon which the text as a whole is commenting.  By activating the logic of supplementarity and exposing the fragility of textual hierarchies, paratextual guise helps dismantle the sociopolitical hierarchies the overall narratives aim to critique.  

Chapters

Introduction: Highlighting Unstable Margins

1. Imitating Introductions: Editors' Forewords in Pale Fire and Confessions of the Fox

2. Dismantling Hierarchies: Footnotes in "Getting Home," The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Body

3. Understating Endings: Postfaces in The People in the Trees and Enduring Love 

Epilogue: Teaching and Writing Paratextual Guise

 © Joanna Falk 2024