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A Theory of Paratexts

Paratexts surround texts, audiences, and industry, as organic and naturally occurring a part of our mediated environment as are movies and television themselves. If we imagine the triumvirate of Text, Audience, and Industry as the Big Three of media practice, then paratexts fill the space between them, conditioning passages and trajectories that criss-cross the mediascape, and variously negotiating or determining interactions among the three. Industry and audiences create vast amounts of paratexts. Audiences also consume vast amounts of paratexts. Thus, paratexts’ relationship to industry and audience is most obvious. However, the secret to understanding paratexts lies in working out their relationship to textuality: What is the paratext in relationship to the text? How does it contribute to the process of making meaning? And how does it energize, contextualize, or otherwise modify textuality? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by presenting a theory of paratextuality. To do so, first we must examine the nature of this relationship. I will then offer a definition of textuality that accounts for the paratextual, examining multiple instances of paratexts at work in the interpretive trenches. In particular, I will distinguish between paratexts that grab the viewer before he or she reaches the text and try to control the viewer’s entrance to the text (“entryway paratexts”), and paratexts that flow between the gaps of textual exhibition, or that come to us “during” or “after” viewing, working to police certain reading strategies in medias res (“in medias res paratexts”).