콜리지의「노수부의 노래」와 파라텍스트의 문제

Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the Problem of Paratexts

Having been introduced by Gérard Genette, the concept of “paratext” as “those liminal devices and conventions, both within the book (peritext) and outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the reader: titles, subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes, epilogues, and afterwords” (Macksey xviii) has provided the readers with a useful frame or perspective in the interpretation of a literary work. Indeed, these additional devices and conventions as a frame for the main text explicitly and implicitly control the readers’ ways of reading and interpreting of it. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” serves as an intriguing example of such paratexts as subtitle, argument, epigraph, and marginal gloss. The aim of this paper is to reconsider the relation of these paratexts as Coleridge’s self-conscious linguistic constructs to the poem, to explore their critical significance and pedagogical implications, and, further, to get students to be awakened to the complex and stratified modes of existence of the poem in the class.