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Loading... Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretationby Gérard Genette
![]() None No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() As someone working on a PhD looking (in part) at what physical features a particular type of book (the encyclopaedia) comprises, I was bound to read this. What I didn't know is what a pleasure it would be. Genette's writing (and the translation's rendering of it) is elegant, observant and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Be warned that his examples, predictably enough, are largely drawn from French literature, something of which I have read very little. His argument remains valid, but you do have to spend a lot of time in the company of Flaubert, Balzac, Proust etc. A possibly more important point is that Genette is, by his own admission, not a book historian and he's not really in a 'death of the author' world. The paratext is certainly part of the reader's experience of the work, but the author remains paramount as its producer. no reviews | add a review
Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Ge?rard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions as revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interact with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Gennet's work in contemporary literary theory. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)808.014Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Rhetoric and anthologies --LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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