Let's Talk About: Paratext! Wait, what's that?

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The paratext is the satellite debris orbiting and radiating out from the core text: what the post-­telecast chatfest Talking Dead is to The Walking Dead, what Madonna-vs.-Lady Gaga mashups are to the original music videos, what Wolverine action figures are to the X-Men franchise—what all the buzzing swarms of trailers, teasers, bloopers, tweets, swag, webisodes, podcasts, chat rooms, fanzines, geek conventions, DVD extras, synergistic tie-ins, and branded merchandise, in all their infinite varieties, are to the mother ship. If the main text is the great white shark, the paratext is the pilot fish—and if the old-school film critic wanted to sink his teeth into a close textual analysis of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), the paratextual critic prefers to dissect the creation and marketing of Bruce, the mechanical shark at the Universal Studios tour.

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You may have paused over the word "interstitial" above, a paratextual neologism for "the bits in between" the program lineup: If it is listed in TV Guide, it is not an interstitial. In Grainge's Ephemeral Media, John Ellis, a professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, notes that on a cost-per-second basis interstitials (like traditional commercials) are more expensive and meticulously storyboarded than regular programming—a fact that in itself argues for their higher profile in media studies. Traditional commercials are technically interstitials, but they may or may not be classified as paratexts because they tend to play independently of a given program or network. Besides, to the paratextually minded, commercials are so 20th century. Outside of the Super Bowl, the 30-second spot is a vestige of a dying televisual universe.

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In one sense, the critical appetite for extra servings is nothing new. At least since the demise of the New Criticism, where the critic's blinkered eyeballs were glued to the text to the exclusion of all outside forces, scholars of all stripes have attended to secondary material to provide a context, inform a reading, and in general make the meaning of a text richer and more resonant.

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Collectively, the paratextual cohort makes a powerful argument about reception and delivery in the digital age, where screens are as likely to be in your hand as in the living room, where the old boundaries—of time, place, and program—are dissolving before our eyes. To a new generation of web-wise and business-oriented media scholars, critics still bewitched by the autonomous integrity of the titled film or television show are hopelessly antiquarian in their understanding of how texts now send out meaning across multiple platforms. Little wonder that so much of the paratextual scholarship is more likely to draw from the fields of economics, technology, and sociology than from the humanities, where residual disciplinary affinities may still privilege the text as the holy of holies.

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