THE PARATEXT IN THE AGE OF ITS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY: EXAMINING PARATEXTUALITY IN MODERN MASS MEDIA

This project complicates and expands upon the Genettian concept of paratext, focusing on paratextual functionality and meaning-making practices related to the development of American mass media during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Utilizing Ellen McCracken’s “interior” and “exterior” pathways as a basis for paratextual vector analysis, this dissertation examines paratextual functionality in four case studies focusing on the late 19th-century newspaper advertising of John Wanamaker, the WWII-era radio serial Captain Midnight, the 1950s television program The Disneyland Story, and the comment section of Breitbart News during the second decade of the 21st century

First Impressions, Second Appraisals: Going Beyond the “Paratextual Contract” in The American Televisual Opening Title Sequence

Much of the existing academic discourse surrounding opening title sequences suggests that they function primarily by providing viewers with information concerning a program’s characters, settings, genre and themes. Such accounts seemingly fail to recognize more nuanced concurrent functions. Utilizing the concept of paratexts originally proposed by Gerard Genette in combination with a neoformalist approach to analysis, this project identifies patterns, narrative components, stylistic elements and various industrial and authorial characteristics within the field of American televisual opening title sequences in order to explore some of these underlying concomitant functions, and classify the segments that perform them accordingly