Patchwork Girl & Postmodern Gothic
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M/C Journal
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more fromjournal.media-culture.org.au
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2In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles it seems to me have been reversed ... the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. (Ballard 5)
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His fiction 'fleshes out' digitally-induced anxieties with a sustained depiction of futuristic Hieronymous Bosch-like febrility and fecundity, or, to use a phrase of Baudrillard's, 'organic delirium':
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For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Gibson, Neuromancer 12)
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biopunk refashions sentiments of unease with physical immediacy to take the form of nauseating disgust with the biological per se.
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Barbara Page- Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext - Postmodern Culture 6:2
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Like other postmodernist writers,
also, many of these women experimentalists are strikingly self-reflexive,
and write about their texts in the text. One important
difference, though, concerns the self-conscious will among these writers
not simply to reimagine writing as wea
ving but rather to take apart the fabric of inherited textual forms and
to reweave it into new designs. -
An interesting coincidence, yes/no? that what Western culture
has tended to label feminine (forms characterized by silence,
empty and full; multiple, associative, nonhierarchical logics;
open and materially contingent processes, etc.) may well be
more relevant to the complex reality we are coming to see as
our world than the narrowly hierarchical logics that produced
the rationalist dreamwork of civilization and its misogynist
discontents. (347)
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Women in Wasteland - Gendered Deserts in T. S. Eliot and Shelley Jackson - Journal of Gender Studies
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Patchwork Girl exists in the reader's mind as well as on the human-computer interface on the basis of a number of mouse-clicks. Metaphorically speaking, the reader not only creates a digital anthropomorphic being, she in fact fuses with it in the process of reading: 'We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourselves: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery' ['it thinks'].10 As soon as the programme is closed, however, the cyborg disappears into nothingness. Hence, it may be argued that the concept of the female is no longer pre-defined in corporeal, biological terms but produced by female imagination itself.
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I am tall, and broad-shouldered enough that many take me for a man; others think me a transsexual (another feat of cut and stitch) and examine my jaw and hands for outsized bones, my throat for the tell-tale Adam's Apple. My black hair falls down my back but does not make me girlish. Women and men alike mistake my gender and both are drawn to me.
['I am']
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As opposed to Eliot, Jackson maps out a story that is largely based on the absence of men or, rather, the absence of clear-cut gender as such. Furthermore, the fact that the monster refrains from any procreative sexual activity, although attracting both sexes, reconfirms its physically a-gendered nature. Nevertheless, its actual name as well as its psychological disposition point towards spiritual femininity, which, as a matter of fact, dominates the overall reading impression.
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Moreover, the transformation of Shelley's title Frankenstein - or the Modern Prometheus to Patchwork Girl - or A Modern Monster underscores a shift in perspective from creator to creature, from author to text, however, with an emphasis on the independence of the product, the dynamics and self-sufficiency of text as an ever-changing, essentially indefinite 'live' organism [cf. Aarseth's idea of 'cybertext' and its textual dynamics (1997)].
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Andrew Schopp - The Practice and Politics of "Freeing the Look": Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs - Camera Obscura 18:2
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Carol Watts complicates the "Bill-as-monster" model by asserting that
his play
at gender symbolizes the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" and
she claims that he functions as a parody, demonizing postmodern concepts
of self-fashioning and of performative gender. -
However, Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter function in this film as, at
best, superficial sites of monstrosity. From the film's opening shots,
in which a predatory gaze follows Clarice Starling, this film posits
sight, seeing, and the gaze as the greatest threats
to safety and self. The unidentified gaze that initially follows Clarice
appears throughout the film, though it becomes variously identified
as that of Hannibal Lecter, of county policemen, and of Buffalo Bill,
who uses infrared lenses to follow Clarice as she wanders blindly in
the catacombs of his basement. This gaze is not one but many, even if
Silence most often identifies this gaze as "male." -
Thus Young's argument suggests that the
spectator's role is not definitively determined by her or his subject
position vis-à-vis the cinematic apparatus—an idea whose
potential implications I want to interrogate in what follows. The
Silence of the Lambs problematizes all easy dichotomies both
in its depiction of gender slippage or gender-role slippage and in
formal techniques that efface the presumed barrier between exterior
and interior. In this way, the film implicitly acknowledges subsequent
theoretical models that have interrogated Mulvey's initial claims. -
Bill looks into our camera as if into a mirror and asks if the
"reflection" (us/himself/the camera) would fuck him. He then replies that
he would fuck him. In the span of one sentence, Bill slips between "male"
and "female," subject and object, and in the process invokes the idea of
the "male" subject's desire to see and violate the "female" body. Bill
then stands before his camera and tucks his genitals between his legs to
create his "lack," enacting for himself and for the viewer the moment of
castration, though it is literally a symbolic castration, one that can
be repaired at any time. Bill may know what role he is supposed to play
when subject to the cinematic gaze; however, while Bill wants to be the
"female" gazed upon, he cannot help but remain the "male" controller of
the apparatus. This sequence foregrounds what it means to look and to be
looked at, the tentative nature of such constructions, and the relative
ease with which one can manipulate such subject positions. The sequence
posits that anyone, regardless of biological sex, can inhabit either
position, although to do so might require that one inhabit a constructed
gender role or that one figuratively and temporarily embrace a purportedly
necessary castration. Certainly, this sequence suggests that control and
agency primarily reside with the external gaze, and thus the sequence
can reaffirm the pleasure the viewing subject derives from recognizing
the purported power associated with the exterior subject position. -
Diane Negra, "Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates,
and Buffalo Bill," Literature Film Quarterly 24.2 (1996):
193-200; and Stephanie Wardrop, "They Don't Have a Name for It Yet:
Patriarchy, Gender, and Meat-Eating in Jonathan Demme's The Silence
of the Lambs," LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 5.1
(1994): 95-105.
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:: SCAN | journal of media arts culture ::
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In other words, what we see here is what Dion Farquhar identifies as the “legacy of male-identified equality feminism” (1996: 110): in accepting the implicit value system which associates women with biology, nature, the body, reproduction and immanence, and concluding that equality can only be achieved in and through the transcendence of such things, these writers reproduce, amongst other things, “the superiority of masculine values and occupations” (Gatens 1991: 2).
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Given this, feminism’s task is less an outright refusal or naïve celebration of ‘Technology’, and more an ongoing detailed and nuanced analysis of the “difficult territories of compromise and ambivalence” (Munster 1999: 128) associated with the use, appropriation, extension, and/or subversion of specific practices and procedures in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts.
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s Victor Frankenstein recounts, in the early stages of his project he “began the creation of a human being” (Shelley 1818/1992: 52), however, as his story unfolds an important conceptual shift occurs and what was once to be a human being is later described as “a new species [that] would bless me its creator and its source” (1818/1992: 52
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Victor Frankenstein is, of course, incapable of seeing this and his ‘single vision’- which he shares with the majority of the characters in the book- leads to the perception of the monster’s ‘monstrosity’ as both opposed to, and a threat to, the ‘human’: “when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (Shelley 1818/1992:142).
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Jackson’s she-monster, the issue of ‘several births’ is less a monster in any essential sense than “a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (Haraway 1991/1998: 463) of other people’s body parts, reminiscent perhaps of the performance artist Orlan:
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This critique of the technologies of the self inherent in the humanist myth of the autonomous, unified subject is expanded on by Shelley in Stitch Bitch (2004). She writes:
The body is not one, though it seems so from up here, from this privileged viewpoint up top … The body is a patchwork, though the stitches might not show … We patch a phantom body together out of a cacophony of sense impressions, bright and partial views … The project of writing, the project of life, … is, to interrupt, unhinge, disable the processes by which the mind … substitutes an effigy for that complicated machine for inclusion and effusion that is the self (2004).
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With her vision “clouded by steam, dimmed in the candle-light” (<more partings>), she is able to see beyond the normal and normalising perception of the anomalous as a threat to be ‘contained’ or annihilated.
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What we see here, then, as in the other texts I’ve discussed, is a notion of hybrid ontology as (re)generative insofar as its transgresses the borders and boundaries of taxonomic logic, remapping ‘our social and bodily reality’ by articulating the transitory and shifting chiasmatic relations between bodies of flesh, bodies of knowledge, and social bodies.
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Anderson, R. W. (1999) “Body Parts That Matter: Frankenstein, or The Modern Cyborg?”, http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/anderson1.htm , accessed August 1, 2005
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Haraway, D. (1992) “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”, in Cultural Studies, eds. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P.A. Treichler, New York: Routledge
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Michael Joyce - Nonce Upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction - Modern Fiction Studies 43:3
Tags: hypertext on 2008-02-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
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My own amended definition of hypertext acknowledged the
mortality and turned the metaphor to drama while unfortunately adding an
element of the metaphysical: "hypertext is
[End Page 580]
reading and writing in an
order you choose where your choices change the nature of what you read"
(Joyce 177).
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Thomas C. Foster - "Trapped by the Body"? Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction - Modern Fiction Studies 43:3
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Andrew Ross once rather notoriously described the cyberpunk fiction
of William Gibson, originator of the cyberspace metaphor, as "the most
fully delineated urban fantasies of white male folklore"
[End Page 708]
(145).
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In Ross's reading, cyberpunk representations of virtual realities and
human-computer interfaces do indeed turn out to be "nothing but air
guitar writ large," not only commercialized hype (as Robert Sawyer
suggests) but specifically adolescent male commercialized hype. -
Both text-based and graphic virtual interfaces make possible the
decoupling of public persona from the physical space of the body. This
[End Page 709]
detachment certainly lends itself to a traditional Cartesian
dualism between mind and body, and therefore can also reproduce the
gendered hierarchy that equates masculinity with universal rationality
and femininity with embodied particularity.
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Gendered Monsters, The Chimera Herself
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This fine distinction utterly fails to detract from Jackson's chief
point, as I understand it, in the lexia, which is that Derrida attributed
fathers to the living (but not mothers) used language--pervert, vagrant,
adventurer, bum--that seems to exclude the traditional female, who is none
of the above. -
If one accepts the hidden logic of Jackson's version of Derrida's quote,
that logos is male, then by circumventing the logos, the hierarchy, the
inherent order, the word-spells of the book, one might avoid its
maleness.
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The Cyberspace and Critical Theory Overview
site maintained by George Landow
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more fromwww.cyberartsweb.org
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Érudit | RON n41-42 2006 : Keep : Growing Intimate With Monsters: Shelley Jackson’s
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The gothic, in this sense, emerges as the deep and unsettling recognition that the technological is the formative ground of subjectivity, the very condition of our becoming.
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Each of these “pieces” are not so much parts of some former whole, the singular narrative or life story that we as readers are invited to reconstitute. They are rather nodal points in a reticular design that is materially shaped and formed by the reader’s interactions:
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Patchwork Girl, then, is not simply a character in a novel, she is the novel:
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This act of distributed authorship, however, foregrounds not only the role of these two human writers, but that of the text itself, “Herself” referring to “Patchwork Girl,” the network of links that plays a significant part in what the text may become as either Mary Shelley or Shelley Jackson. Patchwork Girl is her own author, or at least of one of her own authors.
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In positioning the reader as another Victor Frankenstein, one who must toil, in Mary Shelley’s words, “among the unhallowed damps of the grave” (82), the text presents itself as more than a variety of malleable materials to be arranged at will; it has a robust alterity that persistently draws attention to itself, which addresses the reader, and compels her awareness of the text as a productive force in its own right, calling itself into being as much as it is called into being by either author or reader: “I am buried here,” reads an early lexia, “You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself”
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We do not escape the graveyard of reading without some taint or stain, some mud packed under our fingernails, to mark our struggle to bring meaning to these words.
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This attention to the somatic dimension of technology, to its ineradicable otherness, and its capacity to affect the reader directly, is the point at which Patchwork Girl is most emphatically a gothic text, one that signifies the ghostly presence of the corporeal as the condition or ground of all signification.
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Frankenstein is depicted here as a novel not of sense, or even sensibility, but of sensation; the danger it poses is not simply that it abjures its responsibility to teach lessons of “conduct, manner, or morality,” but that it excites the body, that it can somehow by-pass our “understanding” and touch us more deeply, at the level of nerves, muscles, and tissues.
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As a literature of somatic affect, the gothic troubled the Cartesian belief that the mind and body were mutually exclusive substances, the mind being exempted from the dictates of nature to which the body must conform.
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Such a separation was the cornerstone of Enlightenment philosophy, as it was only by divorcing the mind from the body that one could construe Nature as an object of analysis, a place of hidden secrets into which the mind of man might venture.
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The gothic, as the writer for the Quarterly Review makes clear, threatened this hierarchical privileging of mind over body, by heightening our awareness of our corporeal nature. The “struggle” the reviewer fears is precisely that of the body asserting its role in the formation and maintenance of the subject, not as its occulted other, but as the very condition of its being.
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Novels, in this sense, were not so much “read” by women, as “touched,” “felt,” or even, in one particularly recurrent trope, “ingested.” As Ina Feris argues, the “striking thing about the characterization of female reading is that it makes reading an act of the body rather than the mind” (37).
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The affective dangers of novel-reading, and most especially of reading arcane tales of the uncanny and the supernatural, might be thought to have little place in the era of computer-mediated communications. The virtual realm inhabited by readers of electronic texts has been consistently troped as the fulfilment of the Cartesian desire to divorce the mind from its material substrate.
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As Hayles argues, it is now conventional to conceptualize cyberspace as “a disembodied realm of information that humans enter by leaving their bodies behind. In this realm, so the story goes, we are transformed into information ourselves and thus freed from the constraints of embodiment” (“Boundary Disputes” 34).
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Texts such as Jackson’s, however, suggest that the capacity of the gothic novel to seduce its reader, to draw her into an emotional exchange negotiated at the level of the body itself, persists even in the “disembodied realm” of cyberspace.
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Jackson compels us to acknowledge both the materiality and the alterity of the bodily parts we stitch together to form this narrative. These are not just arms and legs, but Eleanor’s arm, and Jane’s leg, their stories are not effaced in the act of adding them to some new body, but are rather inscribed indelibly on its surface.
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The abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other
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As the body loses its distinctive shape, its coherence and unity, we are compelled to confront the possibility that form is not the natural state of matter. The shaping of the world into identifiable patterns is less the spontaneous or organic realization of some design that is inherent in matter, than it is an effect produced by and mediated through our discursive technologies. In the world of the gothic, Hurley concludes, form is “shifting, variable, revealing itself as ‘structurality’ (a tendency toward shape and meaningfulness) rather than structure (a stable ordering of things)” (31). As Victor Frankenstein learns, hunted to the farthest reaches of the earth by the creature that he made from dead bodies, there is no escaping the "thing-ness" of matter.
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Identifying herself in her scar tissue, in the join that brings together her disparate elements while still signaling the very fact of their disparity, Patchwork Girl acknowledges that the subject is always already technological, an effect produced by the act of linking, of writing, of stitching.
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What Ruskin calls the “nature of the gothic” might be rethought as the deep and unsettling recognition that the technological is the formative ground of subjectivity, that it shapes our identities even as we shape it.
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Miall -- The Hypertextual Moment
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more fromwww.ualberta.ca
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Andrew Dillon (1996) points to the incoherence of such familiar arguments as the non-linearity of hypertext or its supposed modeling of associationist patterns of mind; Richard Grusin (1996) has deconstructed the nearly-universal attribution of agency to hypertext by its proponents; Paul Duguid (1996) has suggested that the liberationist argument is an illusion.
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The originary complicity of hypertext with information modeling imbricates its nodes and links: this constitutes, I will argue, a problematics central to hypertext in all its forms, a spectral presence that deforms the advocacy of its proponents.
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Thus the third and final point is reached: the death of the text. A hypertext network model, says Landow, shows "the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text" (Landow 8). This, he adds, is analogous to "the way that some chemicals destroy the cell membrane of an organism: destroying the cell membrane destroys the cell; it kills." An individual section of text loses its distinctiveness, being "dispersed" into other texts (Landow, 53), or in Moulthrop's term, reduced to "multiplicity." In hypertext a given text "has no clear defense against the potential vastness of the network and its multiplicity, if not 'randomness'" ("Traveling" 59).
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Corporeality will return, like the repressed Other, however, to shadow the hypertext enterprise.
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The kind of determinism represented here by Landow or Bolter has been challenged on similar grounds by Carla Hesse (1996) in her objection to the use of the term "print culture": this is misleading, she suggests, because "it implicitly carries with it a technological determinism that conflates the history of a means of cultural production (the printing press) with the historical development of a mode of cultural production," that is, "the modern literary system" (21). In the case of print, then, "the medium is not the mode" (22).
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- And just as literary texts must be resisted, so all earlier textual practices become reified: a stereotyped account of them is placed on view for judgement. Thus we encounter such characterizations as "the realm of self-validating truths and decrees" of pre-hypertextual writing (cited 206); the reading process analysed by Iser that is "internal and passive," a purely mental event which hypertext externalizes (221); and the practice of pre-electronic literacy that "serves the interests of individual authority, monologic discourse, and linear argument" (221).
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The argument is not about meaning, but about power.
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These implications are worked out explicitly by Moulthrop and Kaplan in developing the multiplicity implicit in Borges's story, "The Garden of Forking Paths." In the ideal fiction of Ts'ui Pên described in the story, time does not exclude one event because another has happened: events occur in parallel, and the actor in the novel, in Borges's words, "chooses -- simultaneously -- all of them," so that he has "diverse futures, diverse times" ("They Became" 229). This is a striking fable, but the story shows that it is not literally attainable. The protagonist Yu Tsun must decide, and he does so by committing the murder he had set out to do earlier in the story. Borges's plot places emphasis on the necessity of choice: Yu kills; he in turn is hanged. Death, being irreversible, is surely one of the guarantees of narrative becoming.
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In reality, of course, the existence of simultaneous pathways in a hypertext is impossible, except potentially; an actual reader must choose, and will read events in one order or another. Their maneuver thus only mimics "intertextuality, polysemy, or difference" (235): the praxis of hypertext reading is necessarily linear, an unfolding in time. The formal properties of hypertext thus cannot be said to "exactly invert those of print" (235): this is an illusion.
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In this perspective, resistance to hypertext is said to be futile.
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The discourse of narrative cannot be extended without consequences, as the Borges story shows, since multiplying choice-points deprives choice of its temporal contingency; it makes choice formally equivalent to the information that would be considered at the moment of choosing, which deprives narrative of its point.
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- This is one way of pointing to what Moulthrop has helpfully called the hypotext, the underlying structures and specifications of the hypertext that must also be read, which Moulthrop interestingly describes as the part of hypertext that is "arguably the most important." What readers such as Tuman or Birkerts are reporting, then, is their engagement with the hypotext that, according to Moulthrop, forms the "lower layer" of "any hypertext document or system" and consists of "The command structures that govern linkage, display, editing, accounting . . ." Among its other features, it creates recursive structures "that militate against absolute linear control" (no doubt a primary cause of the author-function that readers attribute to hypertext). Moulthrop argues that literacy itself must now extend to the hypotextual form, so that readers will understand print "also as a meta-tool, the key to power at the level of the system itself" ("You Say" 86-7).
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(to quote Proust), "In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self" (Genette 261).
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The four terms for a link used here, replacement, gap, synapse, and rupture, are far from synonymous. This miscellany of terms in itself signals confusion: a link cannot be all of these things, and it may be none of them. Whether this will matter in the long run is, of course, another question: hypertext may become just another writing tool; it may be rejected as the Trojan horse of powerful commercial interests (cf. Golumbia); or it may simply disappear under the weight of its theoretical contradictions.
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Teaching Victorian Literature in the Electronic Age
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"Empowerment" and "active, independent-minded" reading are certainly the promise of hypertext, but they do not occur automatically--they must be taught.
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In what Storyspace refers to as its "map view," a writing space appears as a small box with a title bar across the top. (Other views display the hypertext in chart, outline, and tree map formats.)
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In Delany and Landow's terminology, they treated the hypertext as a "resource" (information provided by experts for extraction by individual users) rather than as an "environment" (a shared body of knowledge that users continually reshape)
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But because links are so central to hypertext, the more it is used the more it exposes student weaknesses in reading--especially the inability to read non-linearly and to link text with context, specific detail with general theme, or one facet of the text with another. And since most students have been trained to be passive readers rather than active, independent, and subversive ones, such exposure tends to increase their anxieties, at least initially, rather than to liberate and excite them, as Landow claims.
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Érudit | RON n41-42 2006 : Felluga : Introduction:
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In particular, he is interested in the ways that our material bodies are tied to the reading act, thus countering the tendency of critics like George Landow to read hypertext novels as “the fulfilment of the Cartesian desire to divorce the mind from its material substrate.”
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“In what follows I want to further explore the gothic nature not simply of this particular work of hypertext literature, but of the activity of reading electronic texts in general, to explore the ways in which what Jackson calls ‘the banished body,’ the monstrous materiality of subjectivity, haunts not only the eighteenth-century faith in the powers of rational powers of intellection, but our own post-millennial dreams of transcendence.”
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Carleton University Library /Scope01
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The interplay between analogue and
digital takes place in a different way with screenic text than with print,
and these differences turn out to be important for human perception. With
present-day screens, reading speed on screen is typically about one-sixth
that with print. Although the factors causing this difference are not
well understood, they undoubtedly have something to do with the dynamic
nature of screen images. Text on screen is produced through complex
internal processes that make every word also a dynamic image, every
discrete letter a continuous process. -
As a result of its
construction as a navigable space, electronic hypertext is intrinsically
more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than are most print
texts. -
Here is Blackstone's assessment: "Style and sentiment are the
essentials of a literary composition. These alone constitute its
identity. The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as
vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance" (qtd. in Rose
89). -
Thus a
hierarchy of values emerged which placed at the ascendant end of the scale
the disembodied, the creative, the masculine, and the writer who worked
for glory; at the lower end of the scale were the embodied, the
repetitive, the feminine, and the writer who worked for money. -
As Rose makes clear, it was the author's
style--the clothes he selected to dress his thought--that was considered
most indicative of his individual personality, so style was also
associated with the originality that was rapidly becoming the touchstone
of literary value. -
The main components of the hypertextual corpus are "body of text," containing the female monster's narration and theoretical
speculations on hypertextual and human bodies; "graveyard," where the
stories of the creatures whose parts were used to make the female monster
are told; "story," in which are inscribed excerpts from the relevant
passages in Frankenstein along with the monster's later adventures;
"journal," the putative journal of Mary Shelley, where she records her
interactions with the female monster; and "crazy quilt," a section
containing excerpts from Frank Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz,
as well as reinscriptions from other parts of the text.7 -
For the
female monster, it is mere common sense to say that multiple
subjectivities inhabit the same body, for the different creatures from
whose parts she is made retain their distinctive personalities, making her
an assemblage rather than a unified self. -
The body is a patchwork," Jackson remarks,
"though the stitches might not show. It's run by committee, a loose
aggregate of entities we can't really call human, but which have what look
like lives of a sort... [These parts] are certainly not what we think of
as objects, nor are they simple appendages, directly responsible to the
brain -
The movement out of the flat plane evokes the
hypertext's stacks, which suggest through their placement a
three-dimensional depth to the screen and a corresponding ability to
emerge from the depths or recede into them. -
Like the hypertext stacks, the monster will not be content to reside
quiescent on the page, moving fluidly between the world represented on the
pages of Mary Shelley's text and the three-dimensional world in which Mary
Shelley lives as she writes this text. -
metalepsis, the merging of
diegetic levels that normally would be kept distinct.8 It signals the dangerous potential of the monstrous
text/body to disrupt traditional boundaries in a border war where the
stakes are human identity. -
we
enter these textual blocks through a bodily image, implying that the text
lies within the represented body -
Here,
however, the body is figured not as the product of the immaterial
work but a portal to it, thus inverting the usual hierarchy that
puts mind first. -
The transformation of the text from
durable inscription into what I have elsewhere called a flickering
signifier means that it is mutable in ways that print is not, and this
mutability serves as a visible mark of the multiple levels of
encoding/decoding intervening between user and text (Hayles, "Virtual
Bodies"). -
The fact that this sewing takes place within the
fiction makes Mary Shelley a character written by Shelley Jackson rather
than an author who herself writes. This situation becomes more complex
when Mary Shelley is shown both to sew and write the monster,
further entangling fiction and metafiction. "I had made her, writing deep
into the night by candlelight," Mary Shelley narrates, "until the tiny
black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing
a great quilt" (journal/written). -
The surface of the text-as-image may look solid, this passage suggests,
but the "vaporous machinery" generating it marks that solidity with the
mutability and distributed cognition characteristic of flickering
signifiers. -
In one of the fiction's climactic scenes, Mary and the monster,
having become lovers and grown physically intimate with each other's
bodies, decide to swap patches of skin. -
As the
narrator notes, this body/writing analogy allowed rhetoricians to conclude
that writing was bad if it resembled a disproportioned or grotesque body.
But the analogy was to go only so far; writing was not actually to
become the body. -
Joseph Addison found any writing distasteful that was configured in the
shape of the object it represented, such as George Herbert's poem "Wings,"
printed to resemble the shape of wings. -
this hypertext, like the monster's body, hints
that it is most itself in the links and seams that join one part to
another. -
It is primarily through the complex enactment of
linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed
cognitive environment in which the text is read, that Patchwork
Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century
debates over copyright. Instead of an immaterial work, this text
foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies,
readerly bodies, and the writing technologies that produce and connect
them. Instead of valorizing originality, it produces itself and its
characters through acts of appropriation and transformation that imply
writing and subjectivity are always patchwork quilts of reinscription and
innovation. Rejecting the notion of an author's unique genius, it
self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions,
from the monster as assemblage to the distribution of authorship between
the monster "herself," Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the reader, the
computer, and other more shadowy actors as well. -
Since the past and the future can
be played out in any number of ways, the present moment, the lexia we are
reading right now, carries an unusually intense sense of presence, all the
more so because it is a smaller unit of narration than normally
constitutes an episode. -
Part of the monstrosity, then, is this mingling of the
subjectivity we attribute to characters, authors, and ourselves as
readers, with the non-anthropomorphic actions of the computer program.
This aspect of the text's monstrous hybridity is most apparent in "Crazy
Quilt," where excerpts from Frank Baum's The Patchwork Girl of
Oz increasingly intermingle with other sections of the hypertext
and with the instructions from the Storyspace manual. -
"Our sense of who we are is mostly made up of what
we remember being. We are who we were; we are made up of memories." But
each of us also holds in her mind experiences she has forgotten. Do these
memories, the monstrous Anthony speculates, cohere to make another
subject, mutually exclusive to the subject constituted through the
memories one remembers? If so, "within each of you there is at least one
other entirely different you, made up of all you've forgotten... More
accurately, there are many other you's, each a different combination of
memories. These people exist. They are complete, if not exactly present,
lying in potential in the buried places in the brain" -
ane
Yellowlees Douglas, writing on Michael Joyce's hypertext fiction
Afternoon, suggests that closure is achieved not when all the
lexias have been read, but when the reader learns enough about the central
mystery to believe she understands it. -
Why do we talk and write incessantly about the "text," a term that
obscures differences between technologies of production and implicitly
promotes the work as an immaterial construct? Why do we continue to talk
about the signifier as if it were a flat mark with no internal structure,
when the coding chains of the digital computer operate in a completely
different fashion? Why do our discussions of reading and writing largely
focus on the author and reader, ignoring the cognitively sophisticated
actions of intelligent machines that are active participants in the
construction of meaning? -
It is primarily through the complex enactment of
linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed
cognitive environment in which the text is read, that Patchwork
Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century
debates over copyright. Instead of an immaterial work, this text
foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies,
readerly bodies, and the writing technologies that produce and connect
them. Instead of valorizing originality, it produces itself and its
characters through acts of appropriation and transformation that imply
writing and subjectivity are always patchwork quilts of reinscription and
innovation. Rejecting the notion of an author's unique genius, it
self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions,
from the monster as assemblage to the distribution of authorship between
the monster "herself," Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the reader, the
computer, and other more shadowy actors as well.
-
-
1Expand
Clayton, "_Patchwork Girl_ in the Romantics Classroom", Romanticism and Contemporary Culture, Praxis Series, Romantic Circles
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The most compelling dimension of
this hypertext is how it connects four sets of motifs: first, issues of
reproduction and sexuality—childbirth, female creativity, and queer
sexuality; second, issues of embodiment—monstrosity, the artificially
constructed body, prosthesis, the cyborg; third, traditionally female arts
such as sewing, weaving, quilting, and patchwork; and fourth, literary theories
of intertextuality, nonlinearity, fragmentation, dispersal, and dissemination.
-
-
7Expand
Clark, "Hypertext as Feminist Pedagogy"
Tags: feminist, hypertext on 2008-01-31 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromkairos.technorhetoric.net
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The major hypertext theorists (e.g., George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce) have focused, for the most part, on the relationship between hypertext and print. I wish to depart from this practice by examining the relationship between hypertext and people – specifically, people who read and write literary hypertext.
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Jay David Bolter, drawing on the terminology of classical rhetoric, describes hypertext as "topographic" (36); that is to say, hypertext consists of textual topics (literally, places), also called lexias or simply "chunks" of text, that are spatially dispersed yet linked together in a dynamic network.
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A final point regarding terminology is that the words "reader" and "writer" do not transfer smoothly from traditionally literacy and literature to the new medium of hypertext. Following Pamela Gilbert and others, I will use the neologism wreader to represent the blurring of boundaries between the acts of reading and writing discussed by Landow (4).
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Reading and writing conventional text and wreading hypertext are two quite distinct ways of knowing. For instance, conventional text relies heavily on linear, syllogistic logic, while hypertext logic is associational. An epistemology that reflected hypertext experience would embrace paradox, open-endedness, tangential thinking, and other qualities that are suppressed in conventional text.
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Feminist epistemologists differ from the mainstream in arguing that knowledge is contingent, tentative, and partial. There is no neutral, universal, objective, or apolitical epistemic location or standpoint. Knowledge is also validated within epistemic communities, as opposed to resting solely on evidence observed by an individual knower.
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But knowing a hypertext is more like knowing another person, or at least another changing, living being of some sort. Like a person, every hypertext shifts and resists final predication; the text cannot be "nailed down.
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In speaking of hypertext as a living being, I am explicitly rejecting the conventional spatial metaphor of hypertext as landscape, which Gilbert has associated with a masculinist, colonial narrative (258). Hypertext, with its mutable, dynamic, unstable nature, cannot be known
effectively as an object or a mapped landscape.
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12Expand
Stuart Moulthrop - Pushing Back: Living and Writing in Broken Space - Modern Fiction Studies 43:3
Tags: hypertext on 2008-03-25 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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One of the most prevalent problems plaguing current hyperfiction is what
I call the "poles-in-your-face" effect: Many of the hyperstories found
online are lacking in content and quality writing because the novelty
of hypertext makes all other aesthetic concerns secondary. This seems
to be an intrinsic problem with newly discovered forms. . . . (par. 1) -
Words in this view (that is, printed
words) signify exhaustively and absolutely. They are arranged just
so, and, in the case of "quality" writing, to best effect. I
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