Паратекст о паратексте

Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. Труды института лингвистических исследований. 2025. Т. 21.3. С. 13–25.

Kasatkina A., Сергеев М. Л.

This article introduces a collection of publications selected from the Proceedings of the conference “Circum Text: Para, Meta-, and Other Marginalia” (Institute for Linguistic Studies RAS, St. Petersburg, October 19–21, 2023). It describes the general agenda of paratextual studies and aligns the selected articles with its various aspects. Paratext is a variety of verbal and visual elements that frame a text and influence its perception by the reader. The conference participants explored the heuristic potential of the paratextual optics for a variety of disciplinary fields and materials. When selecting articles for the collection, we sought to present materials related to the history of book, a classical object for paratextual studies, and to simultaneously demonstrate the universality of the “text-paratext” dyad and its heuristic value for other information carriers and areas of humanities. For this purpose, apart from studies in the interlinear translations found in the 19th-century Muslim literature and inscriptions on Pomor handwritten books’ pages, our collection also includes an analysis of attempts on the part of Russian army draftees and their relatives to refer to legal norms when confronting enlistment officers. In addition, this article also considers another kind of evidence, rather untypical for paratextual studies, viz. legalistic documents from the later period of the Soviet bureaucracy in the light of modern theoretical sociolinguistics. The results show that, along with the language of linguistic anthropology of law, this approach can serve as another possible alternative to Genette's structural-semiotic model for studies in “near-text” elements. At the same time, our materials demonstrate the undeniable advantages of the Genette's toolkit, given its ability to customize the research optics for the needs of any text studies in any field explored.

Keywords: текст, история книги, социолингвистика, text, sociolinguistics, book history, антропология бюрократии, паратекст, paratexts, anthropology of bureaucracy