Ever since Gérard Genette’s Seuils (1987; English: Paratexts, 1997), scholars in the fields of literary and media studies have begun to focus more closely on the elements beyond the actual text that accompany and ultimately constitute the publication of the book (Alworth 2018; Gray 2010; Sedmeier 2018). Yet while the number of studies on paratextual elements has grown substantially, little attention has been paid to the ways in which these elements communicate with each other, particularly across different publications and across space and time. Paratextual elements form and interact in relations around, between, and beyond texts and books. This session therefore looks at a wide range of print and digital publications, authors, and literary media to show how paratextual interconnectivity determines the ways in which authors, editors, designers, publishers, and readers correspond, collaborate or even compete with each other. Accordingly, this session is not invested in the paratext as a “threshold” (Genette) to the text, but as an interconnected sphere of paratextual elements. Building on the work of scholars such as Maclean (1991), McCoy (2006) and Stanitzek (2005), this session argues that paratextual elements demand a simultaneous interrogation into the workings of their aesthetics, their structure, and their historicity, always already alluding to questions of power, hierarchy, and appropriation. This session develops analytical approaches that move beyond the flat ontology of the Latourian actor-network and stop short of a potentially all-too limiting reliance on the dynamics of Bourdieu’s literary sociology or traditional hermeneutics of suspicion.

Kinohi Nishikawa’s paper examines Toni Morrison’s career-long interest in shaping the look of her books’ covers. Having worked as a senior editor at Random House, Morrison was especially aware of the importance of cover design to trade books’ success. The paper surveys Morrison’s covers, moving from her early years when her literary and editorial career overlapped through her celebrity years at the time of Beloved’s publication and ending with her later years as a celebrity author. The covers, Nishikawa argues, reveal a trajectory of literary authorship that prioritizes standardization in support of creating a brand identity but that also affords creative agency in light of the author’s own success.

In a similar vein, Dustin Breitenwischer will use his talk to discuss the complex paratextual constellation that emerges from the 2009 City Lights edition of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (originally published in 1845), featuring Angela Davis’s “Lectures on Liberation” (1969). The paratextual elements of this edition produce a far-reaching constellation whose analysis allows for a diachronic reassessment of the historical texts and the position of their authors in the U.S. literary field. The talk will show how the edition accomplishes to put Douglass’s autobiographical narrative at the center of the book while positioning Douglass and Davis as activist companions and, at the same time, as competitors over the book’s authorial sovereignty and aesthetic autonomy.

Focusing on the anti-hegemonic potential of paratextual communication as well, Jasmin Wrobel uses her talk to discuss the ways in which Leandro Assis and Triscila Oliveira’s collaborative work, which was published in weekly intervals on the Instagram profiles of the creators between April 2020 and April 2021, addresses phenomena of social segregation, sexualized and racialized discrimination and violence in Brazil. In 2021, the authors published almost all episodes and some of the characters’ volatile ‘Instagram stories’ in a book format. Jasmin Wrobel’s talk takes seriously the differences between book and digital publications and focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of the paratextual and parapictorial framings and elements of the episodes published on Instagram (the captions, profile names, the comments of fictitious and ‘reals’ users), paying particular attention to the metatextual function regarding the digital publishing infrastructures and strategies.

Pierre-Héli Monot turns to the “Underground G.I. Press,” published during the Vietnam War, as a prime example of high-risk literature written by ordinary, non-professional social actors. On their front page, these antimilitarist, polemical, often intersectional publications almost always included a reference to DOD Directive 1325.6, which guaranteed that “mere possession of unauthorized printed material may not be prohibited.” DOD 1325.6 effectively protected servicemen and servicewomen from legal prosecution and allowed marginal discourse to circulate freely on the battlefield. The advent of digital communication among troops and the dissolution of underground print networks since the mid-1990s has, in turn, invalidated DOD 1325.6 and made polemical discourse highly vulnerable to censorship and legal prosecution. The paper asks, did paratexts imply a series of legal dispositifs which have lost their applicability in digital contexts? And, if so, how should literary theorists reconceptualize the phenomenon of the paratext?