The Poetics of Subtitles in The Chronological Dictionary of The Romanian Novel
The Poetics of Subtitles in The Chronological Dictionary of The Romanian Novel

Summary/Abstract: Starting from Gérard Genette’s claim that the object of poetics is not the text in its singularity, but its textual transcendence, this study aims to overview the subtitles of Romanian novels, reading them through lens that are as much contextual as they are textual. The contextual approach focuses on the evolution of subtitles throughout the history of the Romanian novel, highlighting their characteristic features in different historical periods, in relation to literary-artistic genres and larger socio-cultural contexts, with a view to shedding light on a possible secondary history of the novel filtered through the history of subtitles. In its turn, the textual approach sees subtitles as “paratexts” that represent, in Genette’s terms, “thresholds of interpretation” situated both inside and outside discourse, in a frontier area, with everything that such a position implies. Occupying this middling position, subtitles are revealed to have specific functions and impacts, which are sometimes more significant for the process of interpretation than those of titles themselves, being part of the so-called domain of “titology”.

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