INERADICABLE STAIN
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SHELLEY JACKSON'SINERADICABLE STAIN
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"Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for Some Nice Things Other People Have Said About Me
Robert Coover"Perhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era, Shelley Jackson's elegantly designed, beautifully composed Patchwork Girl [...] offers the patient reader, if there are any left in the world, just such an experience of losing oneself to a text, for as one plunges deeper and deeper into one's own personal exploration of the relations here of creator to created and of body to text, one never fails to be rewarded and so is drawn ever deeper, until clicking the mouse is as unconscious an act as turning a page, and much less constraining, more compelling."
Michael Joyce"Hypertext's next step....Patchwork Girl is spectacular in every sense, from RayBan to Debordian to Cirque du Soleil....This is a work of dream and desire and defying boundaries, an electronic collage, a theatre of windows, and a cyborg song of communion and reunion."
Carolyn Guertin"Sheer exuberant excess. . . chilling, funny and unforgettable."
N. Katherine Hayles"Wonderfully rich and complex."
George Landow"Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written."
Marek Kohn"A dry wit and a mischievous imagination... Though Jackson enjoys the detachment of maturity, she also retains the child's fascination with self, surface and detail. The effect is a sensible distance, self-exploration that transcends itself to become travel writing about the body. Unconcerned in the slightest with gallery beauty, her aesthetics are those of the hiker, simultaneously appreciating the briars and the skyline. These are travellers' tales in the old style, too, with a nice line in fantastical touches."
"Whatever trail you take, you have to admire [the Patchwork Girl's] heroic dimensions. She's a survivor,175 years old and now toting a laptop. At one gory stage, [her] parts go their separate ways, and the Girl has to learn how to put herself together again. The answer is a form of narrative, which is also what stops the texts themselves from floating around like a digital stew. Within the patchwork, there are clear, bold stories that the reader follows avidly."
Jeane Larsen"Patchwork Girl instructs and delights us with a chorus of voices harmonious in its dissonance, each bespeaking itself in language that moves the way language should. One good thing about Shelley Jackson's web is that it does very well the things that we who are interested in hypertext fiction like to rave about. An even better thing is that in the end it may lead us to question some of those ravings."
Raine Koskimaa"In its unashamed blurring of all possible boundaries--fiction/theory, poetry/prose, owned/borrowed, determined/undetermined etc. --Patchwork Girl makes maximal use of the possibilities of electronic writing."
Jay Clayton"It possesses some of the comic force of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, the repellent fascination of movies like Freaks or Eraser Head, the pathos of the final reel of The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the performative flair of Paris Is Burning. In one class where I taught this text, students admitted to being near tears as they read of the female creature, 173 years old at the "end" of the story, beginning to come apart, to break back down into the separate components of her body."
Kirsten Krauth"If this were a film my eyes would be shut."
Tom LeClair"Jackson humanizes the Shelley monster and monsterizes Baum's charming but essentially powerless individualist."
Maria Aline Salgueiro Seabra Ferreira"Her astute use of the quilt metaphor catapults it to the realms of postmodern discourses of fragmentation, dispersal and the vexed questions of origin and identity.... Patchwork Girl crucially raises the important question of the relations between texts which can include such vexed notions as borrowing, appropriation, piracy, in-breeding, parasitism, pastiche and hauntings, concepts which Jackson's narrative emphatically dramatizes and magnifies. "
Susana Pajares Toska"The beautiful language and the story's depth justify an extensive exploration."
Brown University
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