Paratexts 2.0

In this study, I argue for the need to extend Genette’s typology of the paratext to analyze twenty-first century literary narratives. “Paratexts 2.0” are formalized in a model that presents the new categories of material peritexts and digital epitexts and their main functions. The new model provides a heuristic for contemporary narratives whose authors exploit various semiotic modes in their printed books, and the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies in the digital world. My dissertation is therefore also an attempt to complement the rhetorical approach to narrative with investigations on mediality and modality, and a discussion on the extra-textual dimension of authorial agency. Finally, according to a diachronic perspective, this study explores the ethical values embedded in the choice of using paratexts 2.0 as resources of narrative communication in relation to post-postmodern American literature.

Paratextual information as a mystery-solving device? Is the director's hand an agent of paratexts and interventions? The Deus Ex Machina trick Haneke played on the spectators on Caché tells more than meets the eye: the transition from modernist to postmodern cinema/audiovisual, and the understanding of how the focus has changed from one “era” to another is essential to understand how new media can be perceived on contemporary society.

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia environment.

Short films or micro-narratives, cinematic pieces or units re-assembled into image archives and looping themes, challenge the concepts that have traditionally been used to understand cinematic experience, like linear causality, sequentiality, and closure, and call attention to complex and modular forms of cinematic expression and perception. Such forms, in turn, seem to meet the requirements of digital convergence, which has pushed the development of more compact and mobile hardware for the display and use of audiovisual content on laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Meanwhile, contemporary economies of digital content acquisition, filing, and sharing equally require the shrinking of cinematic content for it to be recorded, played, projected, distributed, and installed with ease and speed. In this process, cinematic experience is shortened and condensed as well, so as to fit the late-capitalist attention economy.

The essays in this volume ask what this changed technical, socio-economic and political situation entails for the aesthetics and experience of contemporary cinematics, and call attention to different concepts, theories and tools at our disposal to analyze these changes.

Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media (2017)
Dr. Pepita Hesselberth, Dr. Maria Poulaki (Eds)