Reading the Paper: A Bibliographic Approach to in our time

This essay attends to features of the paratexts (covers, title pages, dedications, chapter headings) and the bibliographic texts (paper, typefaces, print layout) of Ernest Hemingway's 1924 in our time. Drawing on the work of Gerard Genette, Jerome McGann, George Bornstein, and Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that these features sometimes produce "hermeneutic effects," reinforcing or otherwise contributing to the development of theme in Hemingway's prose vignettes, and that they sometimes produce "positional effects," providing information about the kind of book Hemingway produces, the kind of readership it seeks, the kind of distinction it offers its readers.