(Re)Framing the Paratextual Homographesis: A Case Study of Call Me by Your Name in Mainland China.

The English novel Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman was initially published in the US in 2007. In the same year, it received the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction, a prestigious queer literary award. Since then, the novel has been translated into four Chinese editions, with two in Taiwan and two in mainland China. The most recent Taiwanese and mainland Chinese editions feature dust jackets adorned with the poster of the film adaptation based on the novel. This article explores the paratextual construction of queerness by examining and comparing the peritexts and translated peritexts of the novel, with a specific focus on the cover images and their interactions with the verbal peritexts. The analysis applies the framework of visual grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to the original image as the departure point and its travelling to the first two Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China. Moreover, the same framework is then used to examine the image translated on the film poster as well, followed by its retranslations in the poster jacketed Chinese editions in Taiwan and mainland China. Following that, with the help of Roland Barthes’ classification model of text-image relationship (1977), the intricate translational shifts in the images are investigated in conjunction with the verbal peritexts on the covers, in an attempt to reveal the verbal and non-verbal cooperation in achieving different queer representations of the four Chinese translations. The research is to shed light on the intricate multimodal shifts that occur within the peritextual frames as they traverse sociocultural contexts in Chinese-speaking communities. Meanwhile, the article aims to uncover the subtle negotiations and contestations that peritextual translations engage in with the prevailing ideologies of the target Chinese cultures.