Paratextual Analysis Research Articles

The production of girls’ love narrative in Couple of Mirrors (2021) through transmedia storytelling in contemporary China

ABSTRACT There has been a relative dearth of scholarly discussions surrounding the production of girls’ love (GL) narratives in mainland China since the 2010s. This article offers an illustrative case study of a successful GL multimedia storyworld, Couple of Mirrors (CM), which unfolds across a webtoon, a novel, and a web series. First, this article scrutinizes the multilevel state regulation on queer content creation in different media formats. Second, we draw on Henry Jenkins’ canonical conceptualisation of “transmedia storytelling” to delineate the ways that the production of CM differs from the mainstream BL transmedia stories. Through a textual and paratextual analysis of official producers’ and fans’ participation, we argue that CM’s transmedia storytelling creates explicit GL elements through negotiation between market preferences, heteropatriarchal ideologies, and governmental censorship. In doing so, we show that CM represents a successful non-heteronormative cultural commodity within the mainland Chinese media market.

Translating ‘Le Pagnol des Comores’: Ali Zamir's Anguille Sous Roche in English Translation

In 2017, Ali Zamir's acclaimed debut novel Anguille sous roche became the first Comorian novel to circulate in translation in Europe. This article discusses its English translation, A Girl Called Eel, by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (2019) in relation to the reception, circulation, and canon formation of literature from the Comoros islands. By discussing translation's ties to heritage conservation and literary consecration in the Comorian context alongside a comparative textual and paratextual analysis of Anguille and Eel, I investigate the extent to which the novel's ‘Comorianness’ was erased, reclaimed, or playfully constructed along this translation journey by a wide variety of actors. These include the independent publishers Le Tripode and Jacaranda Books, who respectively published the French and English texts, various French literary institutions and French and UK-based funding bodies, as well as the author and translator themselves.

Da and its mothers of the martyred: meaning and contest in an Iranian war memoir

ABSTRACT Zahra Husayni’s war memoir Da (2008) is widely recognized as one of the most successful productions of Hawzah-yi Hunari’s Holy Defence oral history project. Focusing on this work and by using a combination of paratextual analysis and close reading, the present article explores the dynamics of meaning-making as a contested phenomenon within the propagandist messaging of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The analysis hinges on the fact that despite the official promotion of this memoir as a tribute to the mothers of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, the narratives of these mothers are surprisingly marginalized within the text. Approaching the Holy Defence discourse as a Lyotardian grand narrative, this article raises the question whether in light of this discrepancy, a counter-discursive reading of Da is possible. Exploring this question provides insight into the construction and propagation of meaning in the Holy Defence war memoirs industry in Iran.

Drawing the Invisible: A Study of Urban Space, Informal Migration of Construction Workers, and Precarity in Simon Lamouret’s The Alcazar

This article, situated at the intersection of urban studies and comics studies, seeks to interrogate the nature of urban migration and the lives of construction workers in Simon Lamouret’s The Alcazar (2022), a comic based on and in the city of Bangalore. The article begins with a paratextual analysis of the comic, followed by a Lefebvrian analysis of the construction site, to argue that cities like Bangalore are evolving fast “beyond the plan” (Benjamin,2015) to meet the accelerating market pressure, resulting in failed urban planning, infrastructure, and urban crisis. It will further explore what Lamouret’s comic does specifically to intervene in the discourse of neoliberal urbanism and challenge that discourse. The article will also analyze the formal specificities of the comics form and the multiple visual tropes Lamouret employed to “visibilize” the migrant workers and to advance their legitimate rights to urban life in the cityscape.

Inculcative address, commercial worldbuilding, and transmedia economy in the children’s franchise Bamse

ABSTRACTCapitalist enterprises continuously push consumption of commercial products on children, for instance in the form of transmedial worlds in which multiple stories can play out across media and over time. The popular Swedish children’s franchise Bamse has undergone an obvious capitalist expansion over time, with more and more commodities being made available for purchase. At the same time the brand continues to be promoted as a force for spreading good values and thus provides a valuable service to its audience of Swedish children. The present article explores, through a combination of paratextual analysis and political economy, how these inculcative and commercial goals coexist in a tense but seemingly functional configuration.

Remembered in translation: Retranslators of William Saroyan into Turkish as guardians of erased memories

ABSTRACT This paper examines the Turkish translations of two selected short stories from William Saroyan’s My Name is Aram, paying special attention to the strategies used by translators in the transfer of details describing the daily lives of Armenian migrants in the US and their affective connections to their ancestral home. Through textual and paratextual analysis, and situating the translations in their socio-political contexts, the paper foregrounds the potential of (re)translated literature as a site for observing the changing politics of memory in a receiving culture. It concludes that, while earlier translators aligned themselves with the dominant politics of ‘silence and denial’, weakening the longings of Armenian characters for their ‘old country’, recent translators have been more meticulous about details related to the Armenian identity of characters. They reinstate the memories and yearnings erased in earlier translations, thereby contributing to newly emerging bottom-up energies challenging the official discourse and offering new channels of discussion.

Memory practices ‘from below’: Mnemonic solidarity, intimacy and counter-monuments in the practices of Zoscua, Colombia

This article analyses the memory practices of Corporación Zoscua, a small, grassroots activist group in Colombia representing victims of the armed conflict within the region of Boyacá. After an initial grounding within the broader context of transitional justice and historical memory debates within Colombia, the article focuses on how Zoscua’s practices constitute a form of tactical, vernacular memory-making from below that involves temporary alliances and negotiations in order to make interventions into the mnemonic spaces of the city. Based on a mixed-methods approach that includes semi-structured interviews with participants, as well as textual and paratextual analysis, the article provides an analysis of the conception and construction of their memory wall in the city of Tunja. It highlights first how the choice of location of the wall constitutes a tactical take-over of public space, with grassroots memory being inserted into a conventionally top-down locale that conveys official, state-sponsored national values. Second, the article considers the practices and negotiations involved in designing and building the wall, and, subsequently, focuses on the content of the wall, with particular attention to the collective and collaborative nature of the artwork that, through its imagery, composition and focus on emotions, and contests the high-art values normally associated with monumental practices. The article concludes by suggesting that the distinction between top-down and bottom-up memory initiatives is complicated when examining the mnemonic practices of grassroots memory actors, who make tactical use of alliances to further their aims. As the analysis in this article reveals, bottom-up strategies undertaken by community groups and top-down initiatives promoted by authorities often become entangled or coalesce, evidenced both in the practices and negotiations involved in creating grassroots memorials, and in the resulting materiality of the memorial wall under discussion.

PARATEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF FOLKLORE DISCOURSE

This paradigm of analysis highlighted in this manuscript stresses the contextual significance of paratexts in addition to covering the texts linguistic and visual breadth. Graphic elements are various parts of written discourse that complement the original texts structure without altering its content. Although they do not completely describe the texts content, paratext elements provide readers a general indication of what they can expect to find and what is being told in the text. The prefix para in the word paratext implies associated with, next to, and generally indicates around the text from an etymology perspective. KEY WORDS: folklore discourse, semiotic means, paratextual analysis, narrator, illustrations, aesthetic effect.

Retranslation as an intertextual space: Textual and paratextual analysis of two Chinese translations of E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan

ABSTRACT Two translations of a given text normally tend to be textually related when the retranslator consults the previous version. Such is the case in the Chinese retranslations of E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan. One translation is printed, and the other is posted online. The retranslator’s paratexts, including the preface, postscript, notes, comments, and mailing list posts reference the prior translation, yet there are also covert intertextual relations only revealed by close comparative analysis. This article shows that paratexts bring to light intertextual connections between the two translations but fail to reveal the whole picture of intertextuality as cross-checked against translated texts. It argues that retranslation is not an isolated textual container of meaning but rather an intertextual space in which pre-existing translations are absorbed, transformed, and challenged, and multiple voices are co-present and heard, thereby affording new insights into the conceptualization of retranslation.

Subversion in Visual and Verbal Paratexts. A Case Study of the Translation of a Contemporary Chinese Artist’s Biography

Translation has long been integral to the circulation of art between the East and West (Whyte and Heide, 2011, p. 47). Classical Chinese art was first introduced to the West when a history of classical Chinese painting was translated into English (ibid., pp. 46-47). As indicated by the plethora of books and articles published on the subject, there is now widespread interest in contemporary Chinese art, which has achieved international acclaim since the 1990s. This paper draws on existing scholarship in translation studies and political science to analyze four types of paratext (title, cover design, epigraphs, and translator’s preface) in a biography of contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang. Based on a comparative visual and verbal paratextual analysis, the paper examines the re-construction of the original title and cover design for the English translation of Zhang’s biography. In this “paratranslation” (Pellatt, 2013a), the translator subverts what Valerie Pellatt calls an “Occidentalist approach” in two ways: first, by privileging the source culture—China’s soft power—over the Western target readership and, second, by explicitly but subtly using rhetorical and narrative devices to convey his own social-political stance. The translated paratexts thus perform multiple functions. They promote the state’s soft power by constructing an image of an underground artist whose work, by resisting autocracy, was once suppressed by the state but is now acclaimed both nationally and internationally. Simultaneously, the translation provides a space for the translator’s voice. This study reveals the importance of translation to scholarship on contemporary Chinese art, which here goes beyond translation itself by giving the translator a voice to advocate for social awareness.

BINARY OPPOSITION «HOME-HOMELESSNESS» IN THE NOVEL «ORPHANAGE» BY SERHII ZHADAN

This article examines the novel of the famous Ukrainian writer Serhii Zhadan «ORPHANAGE» (2017) in terms of the implementation of the binary opposition «home / homelessness». The novel is written in travel genre and covers the events of the war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation in Donbass. It is the theme of the war and the genre of the work that creates the ground for the image of the characters outside their home: sometimes being homeless is not knowing whose side of the war your home is on. The article reveals the specifics of the topic of homelessness in a hybrid war in Ukraine using the intertextual research method. Paratextual analysis is involved: the meaning of the title of the novel, annotation, other extra-textual superstructures for revealing new meanings of the text in the discourse of the researched topic is analyzed. In particular, the linguistic material is partially analyzed taking into account the bilingual population of Donbass. Intertextual connections with the Bible, works by F. Dostoevskii, M. Bulgakov, intermediate components, etc. are revealed.

Pratiques de l’argument dans le théâtre français des xvie et xviie siècles. Par Sandrine Berrégard

‘Dans les ouvrages consacrés au théâtre français’, writes Sandrine Berrégard, ‘les Arguments ne sont presque jamais commentés’ (p. 9). Even when it is roundly acknowledged that paratextual analysis decisively informs our understanding of early modern theatre, it is all too easy to cast aside the ‘Argument’, a summary of the events to come in the play, as a sporadic and unenlightening relic of bygone eras. What the author admirably demonstrates is that, in spite of the lack of modern scholarship on the ‘Argument’, it is a text which ‘ouvre […] la voie à une nouvelle conception du texte dramatique et de sa réalisation scénique’ (p. 396). Through a comprehensive overview of the development of the ‘Argument’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (with its appearances usefully catalogued at the end of the book), Berrégard’s study makes the case for a re-evaluation of its critical and metatextual value. It is first...

Paratextual Analysis of “Majmu 'Al-Masa'il” Aceh Manuscript : Study of Philology

This article aims to analyze the paratext elements contained in the book Majmu 'Al-Masa'il. The term paratext is defined as a concept that helps readers interpret the main text of a book except for the body of the text, such as covers, pages, and marginal notes. Majmu 'Al-Masa'il is a book that contains the teachings of fiqh in paratextual analysis. However, this paper does not focus on discussing the teachings of fiqh but only focuses on the interpretation of the marginal notes on the pages of the book. Genette's paratext theory was used to analyze other material found in marginal notes on book pages. Paratext Genette is a theory used in analyzing main texts in philological studies.

Shaping Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Authors and Paratextual Features of USBBY Outstanding International Books, 2006–2019

AbstractThis article contributes to research on equity in award‐winning and honor books by offering a paratextual analysis of 14 immigration‐themed young adult books that were included on the USBBY Outstanding International Books list between 2006 and 2019. Findings reveal that paratexts—all parts of a book excluding the narrative—frame authors who are not members of the cultures they describe as having authority to tell immigration stories through authors’ sociocultural proximity to real events and people who experienced migration. However, other paratextual features, such as titles, covers, and author interviews, reveal ideological problems in some authors’ didactic purposes for telling immigration stories and disproportionately depict migration in terms of escape and rescue. For educators, this article invites a reconsideration of text selection processes relative to an author’s background in connection to immigration and offers ideas for how teachers and their students might think critically about authorship.

José Saramago’s crossover picturebooks and their reception in Turkish

: The article presents a case study of three picturebooks –A Maior Flor do Mundo(2001), El Silencio del Agua(2011), and O Lagarto(2016) –by Portuguese author José Saramago in Turkish translation. It first looks at theimplied readers of the books through paratextual analysis, and then assesses the influence of paratextual choices on the responses of real Turkish readers using data culled from social media, online reader platforms and a specially constructed reader group session. The findings demonstrate that the implied crossover reader has disappeared in Turkish, which causes these works to be received as children’s storybooks. This in turn influences real readers’ reactions, depending on who they have bought the books for –children or themselves.

The Power of Song in Amsterdam: Pereq Shira in Yiddish and the Transmission of Piety

Abstract One of the most fascinating products of late antique Judaism is Pereq Shira, a collection of hymns sung by an assortment of God’s creatures in His praise. Thus far ample research has been conducted mostly into the manuscript traditions of Pereq Shira. The early modern Amsterdam Yiddish print editions have, however, escaped extensive analysis. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the paratexts of both the Yiddish and the Hebrew Amsterdam stand-alone Pereq Shira editions (1692). My main methodology will be a paratextual analysis, using the theory developed by Gerard Genette and introduced into the field of early modern Yiddish studies by the late Shlomo Berger. The spiritual utility of the book in Yiddish is at the forefront, explaining its potential audience how the book would enhance their religious observance. This research is located at the intersection of the study of early modern Ashkenaz, Amsterdam book history and Yiddish scholarship. This article introduces and examines the paratexts of the Amsterdam Yiddish and Hebrew Pereq Shira editions (1692), and reinforces the process of transmission of piety in early modern Ashkenaz through Yiddish.

Fictionalising Trauma: Paratextual Analysis of Select Tamil Novels

Gerald Genette’s concept of paratext widens the horizons of literary canon in multidimensional approaches through textual materials that includes pictorial, title, author, font etc that acknowledges its key notions. In such context, innumerable modes of medium acts as a interlink to highlight the critical concept irrespective of prefixed protocols or notions embedded to the theory. On basis of such interpretation this paper attempts to relocate and redefine the projected idea through the layers of select Tamil novels and their Symbolic connectivity in conflicts of war, trauma, diasporic consciousness, photo realism, expressive images etc. Interpretation of parthenium plant with Srilankan war conflicts and its invisible political sketches through several imagery serves the primary essence of the paratextual sequence in Thamizhnadhi’s Parthenium. A thematic representation of carnatic music to project the cultural and geographical back ground of the protagonists embark on a journey to Paris and the quest for life well characterized in the novel Paris’ukku Po by Jeyakanthan. Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Tamil translation work of Balyakalasakhi gives the classic touch of artistic portrait through the brush strokes of certain unhappy occurrence in protagonist’s life. All the descriptions are analytically evolved and careful observations are systematically carried out in elitist view. Moreover the mere study of this paper well clarifies and serves the rich flavours of paratextual elements and traumatic factors that provides valuable and rich essence to the texts as well as clear understanding of the theory.

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad as a case study of consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in Arabic–English literary translation

Differences in culture, language, and context alter the reading experience, meaning, and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship between the Arabic and translated canon. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti, Pascale Casanova, and Abdelfattah Kilito, I explore translation as consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in order to illustrate the issues involved in Arabic–English literary travel and to move the scholarly debate on Arabic–English translation beyond questions of strategy and domestication. Through textual and paratextual analysis of the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013/2018), I show how even a highly translatable modern Arabic text undergoes multiple semantic and symbolic shifts as it transfers into English. Bringing these findings together with observations on the wider Arabic literary translation environment, I argue that modern Arabic literature in translation is its own canon, deserving of independent study, whose hybridity can teach us much about the dynamics of cultural encounter, effects of literary capital, and the discursive and semantic disjunctions between English and Arabic culture and literature.

Reconstructing the poet’s image through institutional translation—a case study of Rewi Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s Poems

ABSTRACT Rewi Alley was a New Zealand-born political activist, social reformer, and a renowned “foreign friend of China”, who devoted almost his entire life to China. Deeply interested in the Chinese language and culture, Alley was also a prolific translator of Chinese poetry. Although the great Chinese poet Li Bai’s poems have been translated into English by influential western translators such as Ezra Pound and Author Waley, Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems has some unique features in terms of text selection and translation style, which took place in an institutional setting. This study adopts an institutional approach to examine Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems and explores its unique features to reveal a distinctive type of institutional translation in the Chinese context. Through historical context analysis, textual analysis, and para-textual analysis of Alley’s translation, it shows that Alley in his translation has imprinted Li Bai’s poems with his own strong personal marks, reconstructing Li Bai’s image from a romantic poet into a realistic one, but failing to convey the spirit of the original poems by adopting his unconventional style of line-breaks. Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems was influenced by both personal and institutional ideologies and poetics, and his translation was to serve the goal of the Chinese government institution where he worked.

New Perspectives on Retranslation: The Case of Iran

This paper examines the social aspects of retranslation in contemporary Iran. Foreign classics and award-winning literary books have attracted multiple translations into Persian within a short period of time. For instance, George Orwell’s novella, Animal Farm, has received more than one hundred retranslations in the last 40 years. The aim of this paper is to investigate possible reasons for such an unusually high number of retranslations. By analysing sixteen interviews with Iranian translators and publishers and performing paratextual analysis of four retranslations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, this paper sheds light on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of retranslation. It does so by drawing on the trust-based approach to the study of translation proposed by Rizzi, Lang, and Pym, and by offering sociological insight into retranslation in contemporary Iran. Four groups of translators are identified: amateur, early career, mid-career, and senior translators. Retranslation for the former two groups is viewed as profitable trade in literary translation market. For the latter two, retranslation is the process of reinforcing trustworthiness at the institutional level that means trust in professionalism of certain Iranian translators and publishers.