Take A Chance On Me

The sociologist Kieran Healy raised a really good question over on Bluesky today: We’re missing a word for the facing page of text before the start or after the end of a classic journal article. This material survives in the scanned copy of the famous article, a fragmentary and often strange glimpse into forgotten everyday scholarship that was on par with the classic in its time. I couldn’t resist the challenge – and was deeply annoyed to discover that Gérard Genette had already coined ‘peritext’ as a sub-category of paratext, comprising things like title, chapter titles and notes. To be honest, as a non-literary-scholar type, I thought that was paratext, but apparently he also coined ‘epitext’ for stuff outside the text that relates to it (author interviews and publicity materials), with the two of them together constituting paratext. Frankly this looks like a kind of dog-in-the-manger conceptual squatting, claiming as many classical Greek prepositions as possible to stop anyone else…