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Klimek, Sonja. 2025. "III.6.Péritexte et paratexte en poésie." In Poetry in Notions. The Online Critical Compendium of Lyric Poetry, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Ralph Müller, Antonio Rodiguez and Kirsten Stirling, .
 

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 iii...Distribution et communication

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Subject definition and general semantics

 iii.6.1.a) Lyric poetry is connected in manifold ways with paratexts, but can also function as paratext for other texts (e.g. Jackson-Houlston 2008; DeLucia 2015, 125–152; Hillebrandt 2019). The French term “paratexte”, a neologism following the example of the Greek compound párergon (Kleinschmidt 2008, 2), was coined in 1982 by Gérard Genette in his book Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Alongside metatextuality, architextuality, hypertextuality and intertextuality, paratextuality is one of five types of transtextuality in which different kinds of literary and non-literary texts, in obvious or hidden ways, can relate to each other (see Genette 1982: 7–8). Illustrating his concept by the metaphor of a text as a house—an idea taken from the tradition of ancient rhetoric memoria (see Kleinschmidt 2008, 3)—Genette conceives of the “paratext” as all elements that are related to the main text (which he defines as a “sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance”, Genette 1987/1997, 1). Typical types of paratext are the title, the author’s name or pseudonym and bio-bibliographical information about him/her on the blurb, texts on the book cover and spine, the dedication, motto, foreword and afterword and annotations by the author as well as chapter and/or section headings. In addition to these obvious types of verbal elements of a book, paratext can also occur in non-verbal form: “iconic (illustration), material (for example, […] typographical choices […]), or purely factual” “types of manifestation”, e.g. the book jackets of hardcover publications. The paratext includes those elements that are materially connected to the text “[w]ithin the same volume” (Genette 1987/1997, 4–5), which form the ”peritext”, as well as the “epitext”, which unites “distanced elements” that, “at least originally”, were “located outside the book”, either in other media, like “interviews, conversations” of the author, or conveyed “under cover of private communications”, like “letters, diaries” of the author (Genette 1987/1997, 5; “paraext = peritext + epitext”).

 iii.6.2.b) Genette (1987/1997, 2) describes the paratext metaphorically as a “threshold, or […] a ‘vestibule’ […], an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside” of a text. He himself made his definition of the peritext inherently vague, stating that we can “not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text” or not (see ibid, 1). He also hints to interesting borderline cases of his dictum that paratext is “always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author” (Genette 1987/1997, 2) with his mention William Wordsworth’s single-authored preface to the Lyrical Ballads collection of poetry written by himself and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798: The preface to the second edition of 1800 being only signed by Wordsworth cannot be attributed to both authors and thus can only be regarded as “semi-authorial because […] Coleridge, although strenuously shoved aside by his distinguished colleague, was still very much alive in 1800” (Genette 1987/1997, 184). The criterion that paratext must be “legitimated by the author” has also been contested by literary scholars preferring non-author centred literary theories, whereas recent approaches offer a mediation between authorship-centred and communication-oriented research into paratextuality (see Reinhard 2018, 18). With regard to epitext, there are discussions as to whether only this written material can count as epitext or to what extent also spoken utterances of the author can possess ‘authoriality’, as well as whether one form possesses a ‘higher grade of authoriality’ than the other (see Binczek 2012, 240).

 iii.6.3.c) With regard to lyric poetry in book form or in periodicals, the boundaries of a poem are often less clear than those, for example, of novels or plays: Do only the verses constitute the poem and is everything else on the page ‘peritext’? Or do direct co-texts such as the title or number (in collections of poetry where each poem has only a number, not a title), the author’s name and other textual elements on the same page, such as subtitles, dedications and mottoes also belong to the poem? Specifications of place and time (indicating where and when a poem was written or inspired; see Klimek 2019) or of other non-fictional names (of persons whom the author is personally related to; see Burdorf 2019) can serve to stage the empirical author of the text as the ‘speaker’ of the poem; to disregard such information would thus change the number of plausible interpretations of a poem.

 iii.6.4.In addition to the problem of differentiating the text of lyric poetry from its peritext, the differentiation between (authorised) epitext and (random) context is sometimes also difficult, for example in anthologies (see Graff 2019) or in written or spoken form in public space (see Benthien and Gestring 2023). In Western cultures, lyric poetry still has a fixed place in the teaching of literature at school. In this context, a poem is usually presented and interpreted detached from the peritexts it was associated with when it was first published—even though these peritexts are usually regarded as being “meaningful” (Anders 2013, 106). For this reason, modern didactics of literature advocate for also considering the peritexts of book collections of lyric poetry (“book cover, motto, dedication, table of contents”) in educational settings (see Anders 2013, 106).

The subject in context(s)

 iii.6.5.Genette (Genette 1987/1997, 3) states that “paratexts change constantly, depending on period, culture, genre, author, work, and edition”, and that “our ‘media’ age has seen the proliferation of a type of discourse around texts that was unknown in the classical world and a fortiori in antiquity and the Middle Ages, when texts often circulated in an almost raw condition, in the form of manuscripts devoid of any formula of presentation.” Paratext has to be adapted in intercultural translation; that is why the role of paratext in the reception of Greek lyric poetry in antiquity is being studied so thoroughly (see Currie and Rutherford 2019). Works of lyric poetry in antiquity usually did not have titles, but were normally united in collections consisting of consecutively numbered “books”, within which the poems were also numbered, for example in Ovid’s Tristia (Lamentations) or Martial’s Epigrammaton libri duodecim (Twelve Books of Epigrams). Modern authors used this process to signal their “intention to maintain classical dignity” (Genette 1987/1997, 315): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for example, gave his collections of poetry a rhematic title (accompanied by an epithet) and numbered the poems of his Römische Elegien (1795) and Venezianische Epigramme (1796), like Rainer Maria Rilke in his Duineser Elegien did in 1923. During the Middle-Ages, even handwritten books had types of paratext, but many collections of lyric poetry “of the troubadours and trouvères […] come down to us with no intertitles other than genre indications: canso, aube, sirventes, ballade, rondeau, and so forth” (Genette 1987/1997, 313). It was only with the invention of letterpress that many forms of peritext appeared, eventually reaching the richness of forms and styles of the late 17th century (see Moennighoff 2003, 23). Ammon and Vögel (2008, XV) even identified “the pluralisation of the paratext as a striking signature” of the early modern age. Around 1700, the peritextual and pictural presentation of books was especially rich in order to demonstrate the status of the author as well as of the addressee of the obligatory dedication. Typical types of paratext in baroque poetry collections are dedicational letters addressed to patrons and even to personified entities, as Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s preface “An mein werthes Teutsches Vatterland!” (“To my dear German fatherland”) in her 1675 German translation of Guillaume de Saluste Seigneur Du Bartas’s Le Triomphe de la Foi (1578) (see Czarnecka 2020), and even to God, like in Angelus Silesius’s Der Cherubinische Wandersmann (1675) (see Moennighoff 2008). Such dedicational letters can even occur in the form of lyric poetry themselves, as the opening “Sonnet” to his sovereign princess Amalie Elisabeth Landgräfin von Hessen-Kassel in Georg Rodolf Weckherlin’s Gaistliche und Weltliche Gedichte (1648) (see Moennighoff 2008). The tradition of the dedicational letter ended during the 18th century, but Genette (1987/1997, 126) sees a continuity with much shorter dedications at the beginning of modern poetry collections, like the one to Théophile Gaultier in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857/58). In addition to dedicational letters, other forms of early modern peritext to poetry collections and song books include pictorial elements (which could be extremely expensive!, see Schwindt 2008, 176) like frontispiece author portraits, elaborately decorated title pages with vignettes and ornaments in different fonts and colours (see Dröse 2017), prefaces to the reader, letters to the editor, lists of printing errors and so on (see Greber 2008, 23).

 iii.6.6.Whereas the opulence of baroque peritext like very long titles and dedicational poems in Latin went out of fashion after 1700 (see Ammon and Vögel 2008, X), other elements of paratext, like verse mottoes to collections of lyric poetry (see Genette 1987/1997, 145–146), occurred more frequently during the 18th century. In the tradition of allograph notes to early-modern scholarly new-editions of classical poetry collections (see Krummacher 2013, 3–55), we also find authorial self-annotations to lyric poetry by 18th- and 19th-century authors, like Albrecht von Haller’s botanical, geographical and socio-cultural footnotes to his Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte (eleven editions between 1732 and 1777), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s late annotation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1817) and even T.S. Eliot’s self-annotation of The Waste Land (1922, see Genette 1987/1997, 333). Peritexts of poetry collections can be used to shape the (sometimes fictional) “model of the romantic author” (or the ironic play on that model in cases of fictive author-personae, as in the case of Thomas Little’s [id est Thomas Moore’s] pseudonymous early Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esp. from 1801; see Tonra 2014, 552).

 iii.6.7.Already in the early modern period, poets used peritextual prefaces to their collections of lyric poetry to unfold their own author’s poetics, but in the age of romanticism, a preface could transform into “a real manifesto” (Genette 1987/1997, 225), as in Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads he had co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and first published in 1798 (see Genette 1987/1997, 226). From a poetological point of view, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des west-östlichen Divans”, the last chapter of his late poetry collection of 1819/1827, also stands in this tradition of preface/postface-authorpoetics (see Nicholls 2011).

 iii.6.8.Goethe notwithstanding, the process of changing the form and function of the paratext from the early modern to the modern conventions is finished around 1800 (see Ammon and Vögel 2008, XII): Due to the developments of the periodicals market, the means of staging authorship shifted more and more from the peritext (which consequently became scarcer) to the epitexts (see ibid.)—a tendency that became even more marked in classical modernism at the beginning of the 20th century when the new multimedial reality of photography and film, radio and diversified print markets offered even more ways of staging authorship in the epitext to literary works (Voß and Reinhard 2017). In the modern and postmodern period, the connections of lyric poetry and peri- or epitext become a field of various avant-gardist experiments. Erich Kästner, for example, used title supplements that added additional levels of meaning to apparently unambitious poems, and he used explanatory notes when republishing poems with reference to contemporary history in later collections of his poetry—peritexts that are usually missing in the first publications of his poems in newspapers and journals (see Ansel 2016). Already Genette (1987/1997, 5) points to the specific “elements [of paratext] that are connected to prepublication in a newspaper or magazine and will sometimes disappear with publication in book form.” Experimental examples of paratext can also be found, for instance, in postwar American avant-garde poetry: “paratextual notes and essays”, “a divided page of poem and notes” or “palimpsestic superimposition” as a “revisionary approach to a well-known source paratext” by another author, as well as typographic aspects and pictorial elements, as in Johanna Drucker’s poetic artefacts (see Vanderborg 2001, 20–22).

State of the art

 iii.6.9.In francophone research, Genette’s neologism proved very influential soon after its introduction (e.g. Pier 1989) and prompted research on types of peritexts like title or preface in different genres (e.g., Calle-Gruber and Zawisza 2000) as well as in the “complex tension between truth and fiction” under the conditions of our “advanced media society” (for an overview, see Piok and Wegmann 2018). One of the first examples of lyric poetry being studied with reference to Genette’s paratext theory was Pierre de Ronsard’s poetry collection Amours (see Rigolot 1988; see also Maira 2002; both focussing mainly on what Genette calls “peritext”). Genette’s neologism was also quickly adopted in germanophone research (see Broich/Pfister 1985; Rothe 1986; see Moennighoff 2003, 22), but the understanding of the term “paratext” was often limited to the sub-phenomenon that Genette called “peritext” (for instance, by Moennighoff 2000, 22–25). Only recently, a praxeological perspective shifted the focus of research from peritexts to one on epitexts, especially with respect to the modernist ways of staging authorship (see Gerstenbräun-Krug 2018, 67).

 iii.6.10.Nowadays, in addition to dignified works of lyric poetry, less canonical works are also being studied, as, for instance, in hispanistic research with regard to mestizo poetry (see Key 2011). There is research interest not only in historical, but also in political aspects of the paratext (e.g. in Arabic lyric poetry collections; see Suleiman 2013). In anglophone research contexts, the potentials of paratext of lyric poetry have recently been explored with regard to contemporary activist poets, like the Canadian Stephen Collis (see Nilson 2020). From the perspective of critical scholarly editing, attention has always been paid to the question of how to deal with changing peritexts in different publications of a text, especially when conventions change in intercultural contexts and in translation (see, for instance, Schickhaus 2020).

Contemporary practices, methods and debates

 iii.6.11.Due to its generically typical “finegrainedness of language” (Lamarque 2024) and the institutionally anchored expectation of a ‘deeper meaning’ for the reader, lyric poetry frequently evokes explanatory texts (so-called ‘interpretations’), which are often passed on in the context of, and sometimes even in the same volume as a poem. In as much as these interpretations are not authorised by the poet herself or himself, they are not part of the paratext. Nonetheless, Genette himself outlines the “media-theoretical extension of his concept of paratextuality” (Mütherig 2015, 260) when referring to the “author’s public reading” as an “indirect” form of “public epitext […] which in its delivery, its stresses, its intonations, in the gestures and facial expressions used for emphases, is already quite obviously an ‘interpretation’” (Genette 1987/1997, 370). Döring (2018, 75) defines all utterances of poets framing a reading of their own poetry as “performative epitext”. Traditional book readings may be filmed, edited and later published on platforms like vimeo or youtube. However, internet poetry clips, a digital advancement of the analogue poetry films (see Orphal 2014), are produced exclusively for online publication and reception. Such new forms of digital artefacts also demand new tools of analysis with regard to the special relation between lyric poetry and paratext in a “computational network environment” (Rustad 2023, 23–49). Theoretical reflections on the implications of a “conceptual transfer” from book-centred texts to digital publications are needed (see Desrochers and Apollon 2014, Rockenberger 2016): Recent digital lyric poetry is often fundamentally different from book poetry because its digital and “heterogeneous components such as kinetic texts, kinetic images, graphical designs, sounds, and videos” are not ‘additional’ (“paratext”) to a graphically represented text, but are an integral part of the whole electronic and digitally embedded multimodal lyric artefact (see Thangavel, Menon and Campbell 2019, 646). Thus, recent digital lyric poetry blurs Genette’s traditional differentiation between ‘text’ and ‘paratext’: When intentionally produced for publication on social media platforms as “Instapoetry”, “multimodal elements” of text, sound and image are intertwined right from the beginning of the production process (see Korecka 2023, 129). Such “platformization of poetry is accompanied by the importance of visibility in a network marked by information and pictorial overload” (Korecka 2023, 130). In many contemporary artefacts of lyric poetry—especially, but not exclusively in digital ones—one can no longer clearly distinguish a (written or spoken) text at the centre of the artefact from the ‘peritext’ serving as a “threshold” to this text (see Nykvist 2023).

Text available under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND
Klimek, Sonja. 2025. "III.6. Peritext and Paratext in Lyric Poetry." In Poetry in Notions. The Online Critical Compendium of Lyric Poetry, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Ralph Müller, Antonio Rodriguez and Kirsten Stirling, https://doi.org/10.51363/pin.5cjh