Mere (Major) Notes: Paratextual Guise in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature
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This dissertation is a monograph on an under-theorized narrative device that has become increasingly popular in fiction since the second half of the twentieth century. The device, which I call “paratextual guise,” is the imitation of paratexts, which are all the supplemental materials surrounding a text such as titles, forewords, footnotes, afterwords, appendices, etc. I argue that paratextual guise highlights three aspects of paratexts: 1) paratexts exemplify the logic of supplementarity by being both necessary and unnecessary at the same time, rendering the traditional paratext-text hierarchy unstable; 2) paratexts are generally associated with nonfictive discourse; and 3) paratexts emphasize books as material objects that pass through many hands before reaching the end of their production process. Paratextual guise involves an overt performance of paratextuality, drawing attention to these aspects for certain aesthetic and political purposes. By exposing the fragility of textual hierarchies, as well as the politics of archive construction and the power dynamics of hierarchized knowledges, paratextual guise helps dismantle the sociopolitical hierarchies the overall narratives aim to critique. Across the dissertation, I combine narrative theory and cultural studies by applying my theoretical intervention, i.e., paratextual guise, to a sample of multicultural narratives from the 1960s to the current moment. I organize the dissertation’s three chapters around the type of paratext being imitated: editors’ forewords, footnotes, and postfaces, respectively. The specific texts I analyze at length in the dissertation include Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Pete Kalu’s “Getting Home: A Black Urban Myth (The Proofreader’s Sigh),” Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. These literary texts prompt discussions of rhetorical narratology, poststructuralism, postmodernism, crip/queer theory, feminist theory, race, (post)colonialism, and more.
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