Afterword: Studying Media with and without Paratexts

Abstract

In my 2010 book Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, I argue that we need to examine paratexts more, not as some odd exercise in completionism, whereby we could then proclaim triumphantly that we’d studied everything, even the “outskirts” of a text, but rather because paratexts are regularly constitutive, central and absolutely important. They are, in short, part of the text. Thus to ignore them and yet still feel comfortable about making a declaration regarding a text’s meaning, impact, power, effects or value would be an act akin to reading only the third and fourth chapters of a book and feeling that this suffices for a full analysis. Undoubtedly we can still engage in analysis with only part of the text in front of us. Indeed, it is a rare day when an analyst ever has access to the whole text, and we are instead always forced to analyse with only some of the picture. However, paratexts are as valuable a source of information about a text, and as important a site for the generation of text, as is the work itself. If we want to know about a text’s place in the world, after all, asking the work alone is as limiting as it would be to study a person’s legacy by consulting only that person. Texts can cast long shadows over society, and the sociocultural examination of textuality should be as much or more a process of sketching out these shadows, and hence of the text’s interaction with its environment, as it should be a process of studying the work itself.