Patchwork Girl (hypertext)

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Patchwork Girl
Photo of a floppy diskette labelled Shelley Jackson Patchwork Girl.jpg
The first edition of the work was published on floppy disk.
Author Shelley Jackson
Genre Hypertext fiction
Publisher Eastgate Systems
Publication date
October 1995
Publication placeUSA

Patchwork Girl or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelly and Herself is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as an important work of hypertext fiction.

Contents

"Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors." [1]

Plot and structure

Jackson's Patchwork Girl tells the story through illustrations of parts of a female body stitched together through text and image. The narrative of the story is divided into five segments, titled: "a Graveyard", "a Journal", "a Quilt", "a Story", and "& broken accents." These five sections each use a different structure and are written in a different style. [2] The goal of the piece is to not only make the reader realize the structure of the Patchwork Girl as a whole but also realize all the pieces that must be "patched" together in order to create one unified structure. Each segment leads down a trail that takes the story in multiple directions through various linking words and images. Jackson uses recurring graveyard imagery in order to continually invite the reader to resurrect Mary Shelley's monster.

In Mary Shelley's original, Victor Frankenstein begins the creation of a female companion for his monster but destroys the second effort prior to completion. In Jackson's version, the female monster is completed by Mary Shelley herself. The woman and her creation become lovers; the creature then travels to America, where she pursues a variety of adventures before disintegrating after a 175-year lifetime. Individual sections also explore the lives of some of the women whose corpses contributed body parts to the creature. The work is an often-cited example of cyberfeminism [3] [4] — "If you want to see the whole," one passage reads, "you will have to sew me together yourself." [5] Furthermore, Jackson's use of hypertext "enables us to recognize the degree to which the qualities of collage— particularly those of appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, and the blurring of limits, edges, and borders— characterize a good deal of the way we conceive of gender and identity." [6]


In reflecting on the structural impact of hypertext on Patchwork Girl, Jackson wrote:

In hypertext, everything is there at once and equally weighted. It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down. [7]

Influences

The narrative is based on two books: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum. The first draft was produced for a Brown University course taught by George Landow. [2]

Jackson's work includes quotations from the novels of both Shelley and Baum, plus material from Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and other writers. [8]

Patchwork Girl is categorized as a Borgesian structure of information, due to its non-linearity. The work reflects the hypertext labyrinth originally expressed in Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths" since the choices in the narrative allow multiple paths of experience.

The Gothic

Patchwork Girl is a continuation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and therefore definitively a Gothic tale. There is much emphasis placed on the gruesome sewing-together of Patchwork Girl and the functioning of her borrowed body. The structure and the content of the text closely reflect one another because of the piecing-together of Patchwork Girl's physical self features in the narrative as well as the interactive element of the hypertext.

Publication History

This work was first produced on Eastgate Systems' StorySpace platform and published in 1995, and re-released on a flash drive in 2015. [9] This was featured in The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space as it is "viewed by many as the high point of hypertext literature in the pre-web period of the early digital age." [9]

Reception

Jaishree Odin examined the feminist influences and gender readings in this work in her essay, "Embodiment and Narrative Performance." in Women, Technology, and Art (edited by Judy Malloy, 2003). [10]

George Landow reviewed Patchwork Girl extensively in several essays and summarizes these analyses in his 2006 textbook, Hypertext 3.0. and explains how this work uses a digital collage of theses, techniques, and words and images, including other writers such as Mary Shelley, L. Frank. Baum and Jacques Derrida . [11]

Marjorie Luesebrink analyzed Patchwork Girl as a landmark innovation in Patchwork Girl was analyzed in "Women Innovate: Contributions to Electronic Literature (1990-2010). [12]

Alice Bell extensively reviews Patchwork Girl in Bell The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. [13] Bell notes the reliance on the readers' familiarity with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to understand the narrative changes that Jackson creates, as she states "the text presents reading as an organic and unpredictable process which can be dramatically enriched by knowledge of other sources." [13]

Daniel Punday compares Michael Joyce's work afternoon with Patchwork Girl and notes that Joyce controls reader's navigation (you can not access this content unless you have seen that content) whereas Shelley lets readers travel freely through the work. [14]

Astrid Ensslin's work, Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature 2022 examines the history of this work. [15]

Daniela Côrtes Maduro wrote her master's thesis on this work: A creature made of bits: Illusion and Materiality in the Hyperfiction Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (University of Coimbra, Portugal)

Award nominations

Patchwork Girl was shortlisted for the Electronic Literature Organization fiction award in 2001. [16]

Related Research Articles

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shelley Jackson</span> American writer and artist (born 1963)

Shelley Jackson is an American writer and artist known for her cross-genre experimental works. These include her hyperfiction Patchwork Girl (1995) and her first novel, Half Life (2006).

Michael Joyce is a retired professor of English at Vassar College, New York, US. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature.

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<i>afternoon, a story</i> Hypertext fiction by Michael Joyce

afternoon, a story, spelled with a lowercase 'a', is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as one of the first works of hypertext fiction.

George Paul Landow was Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He was a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.

<i>Victory Garden</i> (novel) Novel by Stuart Moulthrop

Victory Garden is a work of electronic literature by American author Stuart Moulthrop. It was written in Storyspace and first published by Eastgate Systems in 1991. Victory Garden is one of the earliest examples of hypertext novels, and is notable for being very inventive and influential in its genre. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as an important work of hypertext fiction.

Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media and a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His areas of study include the evolution of media, the use of technology in education, and the role of computers in the writing process. More recently, he has conducted research in the area of augmented reality and mixed media. Bolter collaborates with researchers in the Augmented Environments Lab, co-directed with Blair MacIntyre, to create apps for entertainment, cultural heritage and education for smart phones and tablets. This supports his theory regarding remediation where he discusses "all media functions as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well".

Eastgate Systems is a hypertext publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kate Pullinger</span> Canadian novelist and author of digital fiction, and a Professor of Creative Writing

Kate Pullinger is a Canadian novelist and author of digital fiction, and a professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, England.

Judy Malloy is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.

Storyspace is a software program for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It can also be used for writing and organizing fiction and non-fiction intended for print. Maintained and distributed by Eastgate Systems, the software is available both for Windows and Mac.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deena Larsen</span> American writer of electronic literature (born 1964)

Deena Larsen is an American new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink was an American writer, scholar, and teacher. Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels Califia (2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006). A pioneer born-digital writer, she is part of the first generation of electronic literature authors that arose in the 1987–1997 period. She was a founding board member and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and the first winner of the Electronic Literature Organization Career Achievement Award, which was named in her honor. Lusebrink was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College (IVC).

<i>Figurski at Findhorn on Acid</i>

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is a hypertext novel by Richard Holeton published on CD-ROM by Eastgate Systems in 2001 and republished on the open web by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University, in 2021. Re-Imagined Radio presented a radio interpretation of this novel in 2022 in which Holeton made an appearance. It is a work of interactive fiction with various paths for readers to choose from, an early example of electronic literature, and one of 23 works included in the literary hypertext canon.

<i>These Waves of Girls</i> 2001 hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher

These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher that won the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Fiction in 2001. The work is frequently taught in undergraduate literature courses and is referenced in the field of electronic literature as a significant example of early multimodal web-based hypertext fiction, placing Fisher "at the forefront of digital writing".

34 North 118 West by Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, and Jeremy Hight is one of the first locative hypertexts. Published in 2003, the work connected Global Positioning System (GPS) data with a fictional narrative on an early tablet PC connected to Global Positioning devices to deliver a real-time story to a user.

Califia is a hypermedia novel written by M.D. Coverley in ToolBook II, and released in 2000 by Eastgate Systems on CD-ROM. It is considered an early influential text in the field of electronic literature.

<i>Uncle Buddys Phantom Funhouse</i>

Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse is an early multimedia hypermedia text written by John McDaid and released by Eastgate Systems in 1993. The main portion of Funhouse was written for Macintosh's HyperCard app, but portions of the hypermedia novel are also contained in the original box. The use of transmedia storytelling, meta-fiction, and epistolary format makes this a potential early example of an alternate reality game.

References

  1. ↑ N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; p. 143.
  2. 1 2 Koenitz, Hartmut; Ferri, Gabriele; Haahr, Mads; Sezen, Digdem; Sezen, Tonguc Ibrahim, eds. (2015). Interactive digital narrative: history, theory, and practice. Routledge studies in European communication research and education. London New York: Routledge. p. 26. ISBN   978-1-138-78239-6.
  3. ↑ Sullivan, Nikki (3 December 2006). "Somatechnics, or Monstrosity Unbound". Scan. 3. Archived from the original on 30 April 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  4. ↑ Hackman, Paul (2011). ""I Am a Double Agent": Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and the Persistence of Print in the Age of Hypertext". Contemporary Literature. 52 (1): 84–107. doi:10.1353/cli.2011.0013. ISSN   1548-9949.
  5. ↑ Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. (1995). Eastgate Systems
  6. ↑ Landow, George P. "Stiching together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl"". cyberartsweb.org. Archived from the original on 2023-11-24. Retrieved 2024-02-25.
  7. ↑ "STITCH BITCH: The patchwork girl". Archived from the original on 2022-06-10. Retrieved 2022-06-07.
  8. ↑ Jay Clayton, "Frankenstein's futurity: replicants and robots," in: The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Esther H. Schor, ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. 92-4.
  9. 1 2 "Pathfinders: Introduction to Pathfinders". Pathfinders. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  10. ↑ Malloy, Judy, ed. (2003). Women, art, and technology. Leonardo. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 452–477. ISBN   978-0-262-13424-8.
  11. ↑ Landow, George P. (2006). Hypertext 3.0: critical theory and new media in an era of globalization. Parallax (3rd ed.). Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins university press. pp. 234–242. ISBN   978-0-8018-8256-2.
  12. ↑ Luesebrink, Marjorie. #WomenTechLit. Patchwork Girl: West Virginia University Press Computing Literature. p. 7.
  13. 1 2 2010 Bell, Alice (2010). The possible worlds of hypertext fiction (Thesis). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN   9780230542556.
  14. ↑ Punday, Daniel (2018). "Chapter 7 Narrativity". In Tabbi, Joseph (ed.). The Bloomsbury handbook of electronic literature. London, UK: Bloomsbury academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury publishing Plc. p. 144. ISBN   978-1-4742-3025-4.
  15. ↑ Ensslin, Astrid (2022). Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature. Cambridge University Press.
  16. ↑ "Electronic Literature Organization". www.eliterature.org. Archived from the original on 23 July 2020. Retrieved 22 March 2019.
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