Skip to main content
Open Book Publishers

11. Hypertext as a ‘palimpsestuous’ construct: Analysing Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

Chapter of: Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India(pp. 209–224)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
Title11. Hypertext as a ‘palimpsestuous’ construct
SubtitleAnalysing Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl
ContributorLopamudra Saha(author)
Ujjwal Jana(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0423.11
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0423/chapters/10.11647/obp.0423.11
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightLopamudra Saha; Ujjwal Jana;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-11-06
Long abstractThis chapter analyses how the hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995) functions as a palimpsest in its postmodern multimodal rewriting of the myth of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Since digital culture is one of the major postmodern offshoots, and the idea of the hypertext is the product of literary culture and digital innovations, new possibilities have been brought about that unsettle the traditional conceptualisation of the novel as the printed word. This chapter, therefore, proposes the study of the concept of the hypertext as ‘palimpsestuous’ relativity, with special reference to Patchwork Girl. To serve this purpose, the traditional idea of the ‘palimpsest’ as a parchment undergoes revision in the light of the affordances of multimedia. This enquiry also uncovers the changing dynamics of readership that the new media intervention has brought about. Finally, the discussion highlights how hypertextual rewriting induces the ideas of multivocality, fragmentariness, non-linearity and interactivity through the application of the inter-semiotic paradigm.
Page rangepp. 209–224
Print length16 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Lopamudra Saha

(author)
Research Scholar at Pondicherry University
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0822-6569

Ms Lopamudra Saha is a Research Scholar in the Department of English, Pondicherry University, India. Her broader area of research is Digital Humanities with particular focus on Electronic Literature produced in India.

Ujjwal Jana

(author)
Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts at University of Delhi
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5940-8201

Dr Ujjwal Jana is Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Professor Jana’s areas of academic and research interest include Digital Humanities, Translation Studies, Disability Studies and Literary Studies with interdisciplinary orientation. Professor Jana was a Fulbright Scholar in Indiana University, Bloomington, USA in 2007–2008. He was a visiting faculty member in the Departments of English, Leipzig University, Germany and University of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2014 and 2017 respectively. He received Hungarian State scholarship awards in the academic year 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 funded by the Tempus Foundation of the Government of Hungary to carry out collaborative research projects. He was the Indian Principal Investigator of the SPARC (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration) sponsored International collaborative Project (2019–2023) on “Digital Humanities in the Indian Rim” in collaboration with Western Sydney University, Australia, funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. Professor Jana’s Bengali translation of Amit Chaudhuri’s Sahitya-Akademi-Award-winning English novel, A New World (2000) by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, was published in 2021. Presently he is the Indian Principal Investigator of another SPARC-sponsored International Project (2023–2025) on “Indian-European entanglements: exploring trans-cultural relationships through Digital Humanities”, to collaborate with Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. Ghent University, Belgium funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. He is currently carrying out a research project funded by the Indian Council of Historical Research, India on the 19th-century poet saint of Odisha, Bhima Bhoi, during 2024–2026. Professor Jana has edited an anthology on Digital Culture in Humanities: Contemporary Trends published by a Delhi-based publishing house in January 2023.

References
  1. Aarseth, E.J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/aarseth-ergodic-ch1-1997.pdf
  2. Barthes, R. (1977). The death of the author (S. Heath, Trans.). Fontana, 142–8.
  3. Barthes, R. (1980). S/Z: An Essay. Siglo XXI.
  4. Bell, A. (2010). The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan.
  5. Baum, F. (1990). The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Caliber Press. https://theodoresinger.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/the_patchwork_girl_of_oz.pdf
  6. Bush, V. (1945, July). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly.
  7. Carazo, C.S.P., & Jiménez, M.A. (2006). Gathering the Limbs of the text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. Atlantis, 115–129.
  8. Ciccoricco, D. (2007). Reading Network Fiction. University of Alabama Press. http://www.movingimages.info/class/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/CiccRead.pdf
  9. Delaney, P., & Landow J. (1994). Hypermedia and Literary Studies. MIT Press.
  10. Dillon, S. (2007). The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgn156
  11. Doležel, L. (1998). Possible worlds of history and fiction. New Literary History, 785–809.
  12. Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Vol. 8). University of Nebraska Press.
  13. Glavanakova-Yaneva, A. (2003). Body Webs: Re/constructing boundaries in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. Journal of American Studies of Turkey 18, 65–79.
  14. Hayles, N.K. (2000). Flickering connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The importance of media-specific analysis. Postmodern Culture 10(2). https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2000.0011
  15. Hackman, P. (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. https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.2011.0013
  16. Hayles, N.K., & Burdick, A. (2002). Writing Machines (Vol. 10). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/aloi19666-031
  17. Hayles, N.K. (2008). Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/1795941
  18. Henthorne, T. (2018). Shelley Distributed: Material Assemblages of Frankenstein, Mary, and Percy [Thesis, Georgetown University]. In Georgetown University-Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1050771
  19. Jackson, S. (1995). Patchwork Girl. Eastgate Systems.
  20. Kilgore, C.D. (2013). Rhetoric of the network: Toward a new metaphor. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 37–58.
  21. Kristeva, J. (1986). Word, Dialogue and Novel: The Kristeva Reader. T. Moi (Ed.). Basil Blackwell.
  22. Landow, G.P. (1991). HyperText: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  23. Landow, G.P. (2006). Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  24. Modir, L., Guan, L.C., & Aziz, S.B.A. (2014). Text, hypertext, and hyperfiction: A convergence between poststructuralism and narrative theories. Sage Open 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014528915
  25. Rajakannan, R., & Rukmini, S. (2021). Reading paradigms of digital narratives: Reception of hypertext fictions and its implications. Journal of Narrative and Language Studies 9(18), 357–380. http://nalans.com/index.php/nalans/article/view/450
  26. Sarkar, J. (2020). Reading hypertext as cyborg: The case of Patchwork Girl. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 12(5), 1–7. https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s2n2
  27. Sánchez-Palencia Carazo, C., & Jiménez, M.A. (2006). Gathering the limbs of the text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. Atlantis 28(1), 15–29.
  28. Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.
  29. Stafford, B.M. (1991). Body Criticism. The MIT Press.