Teaching Blog

1. The binding and the way the book is housed will determine the price and therefore the readership.
2. Letters: public or meant to be read by the people addressed in them; exclusive distribution.
3. Texts don’t have agency (?)
4. Texts need to be read in order to express any meaning.
5. What is meant by the “support that enables it [a text] to be read?” Is it just a question of form? Its provenance? Other texts that allow one to understand the text in question?
6. What makes a text worthy of our study? We suggest that this is a pretty strange question, and depends a lot on what kind of work you’re doing – in our group, there are some people who are deliberately approaching some really ‘awful’ writing. What mkaes worthiness is interest rather than abstract ‘quality’…?
7. What changes occur for the reading of texts electronically? The most recent e-readers enable annotations which go beyond the level of intereaction that we can have with a book.
8. McGann quote can serve to highlight issues of readers across languages – linguistic symbologies can shift in meaning across languages – bibliographical ‘codes’ can contextualise symbols/meanings to enable more consistent meanings.
9. Think about issues of typography, font, binding, and other material conditions of the ‘book’ in relation to how texts are consumed and created for audiences.
10. Scientific texts, as much as any other, are subject to the influence and interrogation of bibliographical signifiers, from introductions to paratextual elements to footnotes, binding, print run etc.
11. Continental scholarship: the influence of Cotes-du-Rhone.
12. Negotiation over the nature of “paratext”: depedent upon the position from which the reader approaches the text?
13. Is it possible for *any* text to exist independently of a paratext?
14. We discussed the disourse surrounding the genre of author photos.
15. Much of the book reading experience is entirely guided by traditional publishing guidelines. From the packaging, the blurb quotations, the jacket copy, and design are carefully orchastrated to appeal to attract certain types of readership. This in itself can serve as paratext.
16. Why Gennette is not just pretentious French verbiage (a suggestion only): the idea of paratext, treating McGann’s concepts more overtly in terms of a relationship between reader and text - between the reader and the social conditions of the areas around the type – allows for a more diasporic vision of the act of reading than McGann does..?
17. Can the paratext dominate the readers’ experience in the way that Genette suggests? The notion that the author’s paprtext “controls one’s whole reading of the text” 

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