6/13/2023 0 Comments Patchwork girl storyspaceThe owners are characterized so as to form a patchwork identity in the female monster originally created, yet “forsaken” by Mary Shelley in the original novel. “A graveyard” “resurrects” the creature from buried body parts of other people, mostly women. Jackson provides five possible starting points-analogous to the five human senses, and adds a “sources” page. Where the work starts is left to the reader to decide. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. The narrator, Mary Shelley "herself," compares printed books with hypertext in the “this writing” lexia (no doubt one of the most quoted passages from a work of hyperfiction):Īssembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with in dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to all the rest. The metaphor of both the monster and the patchwork quilt are made literal through the formal aesthetic strategies of the work, with the corporeality of hypertext taken as a central and self-aware concern. Cixous, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, Lyotard, Theweleit). In the “sources” lexia, the author lists further seminal works of postmodernist and feminist criticism (e.g. Miller’s Poetics of Gender, and Barbara Maria Stafford’s Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Jackson quotes passages from Frankenstein, Derrida’s Disseminations, Evelyn Shaw’s and Joan Darling’s Female Strategies, Carolyn Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Nancy K. ![]() Patchwork Girl couples original writing with the aesthetic strategies of metafiction and collage to create a recombinant text borrowing heavily from deconstruction and gender studies. Patchwork Girl is rooted in an allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus-as is echoed in both the title and the author’s own name-and can be read as a feminist response to Shelley’s 1818 gothic masterpiece. ![]() Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl was created in Storyspace, is distributed by Eastgate Systems, Inc., and ranks among the most widely read, discussed, and taught works of early hyperfiction. Alternative Title: Patchwork girl, or, A modern monster by Mary/Shelley, & herself: a graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story & broken accents
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