A fragment of a translation of Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation, and the translator’s introductory note

Abstract

Gérard Genette (1930–2018) was an outstanding French literary critic who made an enormous contribution to the study of poetics, narratology, rhetoric and pragmatics of literary texts. His three-volume book Figures (1998), as well as some articles, have been translated into Russian, but his book Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation (1987), dedicated to such an important concept as paratext, has not yet been translated. To fill this gap, at least partially, the following publication offers readers a translation of the “Introduction” to this book, where Genette explains in detail what he means by the term “paratexts” and why it is needed. Paratext (French paratexte, from ancient Greek παρά ‘near, around’ + “text”) is a set of boundary elements of a literary text that set the frame for its perception and interpretation; a network of threshold devices and conventions that, whether outside or inside the book, determine how it is read. According to Genette, a paratext is divided into a peritext and an epitext. Peritext is those elements of a paratext that are directly in contact with the text (title, author’s name, genre designation, dedication, epigraph, date, preface, notes, commentary, but also publication data, design elements of the publication, etc.). Epitext is those elements of a paratext that exist separately from the text itself (critical articles, advertising materials, speeches by the author dedicated to this text, etc.). Both of them, together and separately, can form complex mediations between the book, the author, the publisher, the reader; such elements of paratexts as titles, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications form the private and public history of the book. Thresholds provides an encyclopedic overview of the customs and institutions of the Republic of Letters as they manifest themselves at the boundaries of the book.