Text and paratext in Mark Z. Danielewski'sHouse of Leaves

Abstract

In Paratexts (1987), the French structuralist critic Gerard Genette begins his study by defining ‘paratext’ as that which: … enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or — a word Borges used apropos of a preface — a ‘vesitibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world's discourse about the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, ‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one's whole reading of the text.’1

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