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The Posthuman
ENGL 165EC - Spring 2003,  Rita Raley
Thu, 4/17 Promises of Monsters

Critical texts on Shelley Jackson
> Shelley Jackson, "Stitch Bitch: The patchwork girl"
> Mark Amerika, "Stitch Bitch: The Hypertext Author As Cyborg-Femme Narrator"
> N. Katherine Hayles, "Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis"
> George Landow, "Stitching Together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl"
> "Of Dolls and Monsters: An Interview with Shelley Jackson by Rita Raley"

Excerpts from Patchwork Girl:

[sewn]: “I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form—a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author. Authoress, I amend, smiling.”

[written]: “I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt, as the old women in town do night after night, looking dolefully out their windows from time to time toward the light in my own window and imagining my sins while their thighs tremble under the heavy body of the quilt heaped across their laps, and their strokes grow quicker than machinery and tight enough to score deep creases in the cloth. I have looked with reciprocal coolness their way, not wondering what stories joined the fragments in their workbaskets.”

[self swarm]: “I am made up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles, and have no absolute boundaries. I am a swarm”

[universal]: “your bodies are already claimed by future generations, auctioned off piecemeal to the authors of further monsters”


 



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