Georg Stanitzek
Texts and Paratexts in Media
Translated by Ellen Klein
To determine the significance and potential of the concept of the paratext for literature and cultural and media studies, it makes sense to start at a more basic level, namely, with the concept of the text, to which paratext acts as a supplement. Adorno thought it an "abominable expression" to refer to phenomena of "literature" as "texts."1 He detected in it an abandonment of the category of the work. Dolf Sternberger, his antipodean intellectual colleague in Frankfurt, offered a similar opinion that differed only in tone: "`Texts'—this has become the universal generic term for the products of writers, or at any rate, the term now considered `progressive'. ... They do not write poems, novels, essays or even stories—they `produce texts.'"2 These arguments and idiosyncratic reactions are now history. In the meantime text has gained wide acceptance—and why shouldn't this be the case? But in view of how the meaning of this term has developed over the years, the old objections would seem to warrant some thought. In the course of things, text has come to be used synonymously with the older term work (opus). In many respects the current definition with all its implications of aesthetics and values has simply been inherited. However, text originally had another meaning; it is not just a coincidence that it was introduced at a time when the concept of literature was being expanded to include trivial literature, essays, and general nonfiction and when there was a growing interest in the phenomena of popular culture. Since then, literary and cultural discourse has had a problem in tow, which is scarcely understood but which still causes terminological complications and uncertainty. The problem can be described as follows: a simultaneous distinction and nondistinction between literary work and text. That is, sometimes they are construed as designating different things and sometimes the same thing. (It is still necessary to specify which meaning is intended, and the ambiguity may be retained for rhetorical reasons.)
1. Theodor W. Adorno, "Commitment" (1962), Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 3 vols. (New York, 1992), 2:90, presumably motivated by phenomena of concrete poetry.
2. Dolf Sternberger, "Über Jargon in der gegenwärtigen Literaturkritik" (1968), Sprache und Politik, vol. 11 of Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 292, 294.
GEORG STANITZEK is professor of German at the University of Siegen, Germany, where he teaches literary, cultural, and media studies. He is the author of Blödigkeit: Beschreibungen des Individuums im 18. Jahrhundert (1989) and the coeditor of Schnittstelle: Medien und Kulturwissenschaften (2001), Transkribieren (Medien/Lektüre) (2002), and Paratexte in Literatur, Film, Fernsehen (2004).
