The Extratextuals

My book on paratexts is finally out: Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Paratexts. ($22, but I see Amazon’s selling it for $14.85. That’s cheaper than a season of Two and a Half Men on DVD! What are you waiting for?). I thought I’d give some tasters of it with a selection of paratexts. The cover, obviously enough is above.

The Contents

Introduction – Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies

Chapter 1 – From Spoilers to Spinoffs: A Theory of Paratexts

Chapter 2 – Coming Soon! Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

Chapter 3 – Bonus Materials: Digital Auras and Authors

Chapter 4 – Under a Long Shadow: Sequels, Prequels, Pre-Texts, and Intertexts

Chapter 5 – Spoiled and Mashed Up: Viewer-Created Paratexts

Chapter 6 – In the World, Just Off Screen: Toys and Games

Conclusion – “In the DNA”: Creating Across Paratexts

The Back Copy

It is virtually impossible to watch a movie or TV show without preconceived notions because of the hype that precedes them, while a host of media extensions guarantees them a life long past their air dates. An onslaught of information from print media, trailers, internet discussion, merchandising, podcasts, and guerilla marketing, we generally know something about upcoming movies and TV shows well before they are even released or aired. The extras, or “paratexts,” that surround viewing experiences are far from peripheral, shaping our understanding of them and informing our decisions about what to watch or not watch and even how to watch before we even sit down for a show.

Show Sold Separately gives critical attention to this ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon, examining paratexts like DVD bonus materials for The Lord of the Rings, spoilers for Lost, the opening credits of The Simpsons, Star Wars actions figures, press reviews for Friday Night Lights, the framing of Batman Begins, the videogame of The Thing, and the trailers for The Sweet Hereafter. Plucking these extra materials from the wings and giving them the spotlight they deserve, Jonathan Gray examines the world of film and television that exists before and after the show.

Word Clouds, courtesy of wordle.com, of Chapters 2 & 3

The Endorsements

“Show Sold Separately will rewrite the rules of what we look at when we want to understand how audiences make meaning of media franchises. Gray, who has long established himself in the top ranks of contemporary scholars of popular culture, writes with particularity about these varied media properties and their paratexts, yet also writes with a theoretical sophistication which feels effortless.”

- Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Exploring the myriad connections and connotations of a wide array of paratextual materials ranging from movie trailers to action figures, Gray deftly challenges established conceptions of textuality, and opens up intriguing and important new dimensions in media and cultural studies. This is an invaluable contribution, and will change how we think about, and make, media.”

- Derek Kompare, author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television

And a bit of the Work – the first par.

A common first line for books on contemporary media, and for many a student essay on the subject, notes the saturation of everyday life with media. Certainly, my list of available cable channels seems to grow every month, while the list of movies in cinemas, on television, for rent, or available for purchase similarly grows at a precipitous rate. However, media growth and saturation can only be measured in small part by the number of films or television shows – or books, games, blogs, magazines, or songs for that matter – as each and every media text is accompanied by textual proliferation at the level of hype, synergy, promos, and peripherals. As film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet not all of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature. Rather, these cities are also made up of all manner of ads, previews, trailers, interviews with creative personnel, Internet discussion, entertainment news, reviews, merchandising, guerrilla marketing campaigns, fan creations, posters, games, DVDs, CDs, and spinoffs. Hype and synergy abound, forming the streets, bridges, and trading routes of the media world, but also frequently forming many of its parks, beaches, and leisure sites. They tell us about the media world around us, they prepare us for that world, and they guide us between its structures, but they also fill it with meaning, take up much of our viewing and thinking time, and give us the resources with which we will both interpret and discuss that world.

book reviews, front covers, reviews paratexts, Show Sold Separately

I recently had the (ahem) extreme joy of going through my manuscript for Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts to make the index (that’s not it above — that’s a screenshot from Google Books’ copy of Watching with The Simpsons). It’s a bittersweet moment in book publishing, since it’s the last thing you need to do before you then see it as a tangible object a few months later … yet it’s not a fun task (though one can introduce very small elements of fun: check out the Dharma Initiative entry in my index to Television Entertainment for an example, or the Bill O’Reilly one in Satire TV). You could pay someone else to do it, but then you won’t see a dime of proceeds from the book, and while I’m not foolish enough to think I’ll make much money off my books, it’s nice to get at least something out of it, even if that something equates simply to a load of groceries or a nice dinner.

Indexing’s also a complex act, since you must wrestle with who you’re doing this for – yourself or others – and if you answered “others” to that question, you then need to try and predict what categories will make sense to these hypothetical readers and their interest. I thought I’d reflect a bit on that act here, while discussing other modes of memory/locating devices. More after the fold …
Read more…

Uncategorized Google Books, index, Show Sold Separately, tagging, Wordle

So, currently my book about paratexts, entitled Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, is in production at NYU Press. It’s due out at the end of the year.

Problem is, we’re all struggling with an idea for the cover. This is where you, gentle reader, come in, since I need your help. Any and all ideas welcome.

A few parameters and notes:

• The urgency here is that NYU keep threatening to use a picture of the Simpsons on a couch that many who went to see The Simpsons Movie would have likely seen outside their theater (the big plastic mock-up of the family, which you could sit beside and get your picture taken with them). Problem is that I already have a book with a picture of the Simpsons’ couch. So, yes, the notion of being able to sit alongside the family does allude to what paratexts are all about on one level, but I really don’t want my books to have iterations of the same cover. Or for people to think it’s a second book by me about The Simpsons. Or am I over-reacting?
• NYU prefer a single image, not a montage
• Which leads to the tackling thing: what one image could be metonymic without being painfully reductive? The book argues that all those things that surround film and TV often contribute meaningfully to popular understandings of shows, to the point that they are bona fide parts of “the text itself,” btw. If you read this blog, you likely have a sense of my take on paratexts, and that’s the book.
• And, of course, since it’s a cover, there are legalities to dodge, and I can’t just lift a commercial image and claim fair use when it’s a cover.

So, please, help me with my cover. Thanks!

front covers Show Sold Separately