Untitled - witz cultural

236HYPERTEXT 3.0 Maria Stafford's Body Citicism: Imogining the Unseen in Enlightenment Artond Medicine:You may emphasize the presence of text links by using a special style, color ortypeface.Or, if you prefer, you can leave needles sticking in the wounds-in the mannerof tailors-with thread wrapped around them. Being seam'd with scars was both afact ofeighteenth century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining anyfinely adjusted composition. "The charm you need is a needle and thread," said theShaggy Man.As Raz points out, "Stitches, or links connect one patch to another, one textto another. fackson seems particularly interested in examining the points ofunion between texts, such that'being seam'd with scars'becomes a fact notonly of eighteenth-century life but of hypertext writing, and indeed of anysort of creative process."Fittingly, my discussion of fackson's web has already taken on much of theappearance of collage itself. I first wrote a good portion of what follows for theElectronic Book Rwiew, one of an increasing number of critical and scholarlyWorld Wide Web periodical publications, but after students in my course oncyberspace and critical theory supplemented it with an HTM L web in the formof some two dozen commentaries, I decided to fi nd some way here to draw upontheir work in a manner appropriate to print. In the Cyberspace, Virtual Reality,and Citical Thcory Web , our lexias appear woven together, and I could odd to rnysingle lexia simply by using links. Here, following the conventions of print,I shall sum up and introduce these additional comments (which are now, ofcourse, part of the "main" text, and hence no longer "additional"), citing somelonger passages in the endnotes. Back to Patchwork Girl andhypertext collage.Most of Patchwork Girl's collage effects occur, not within individualpatches or lexias but across them as we readers patch together a character anda narrative. Opening fackson's web, we first encounter a black-and-whiteimage of the stitched-together protagonist that she cuts and recombines intothe images we come upon at various points throughout our reading. The firstlink takes us to her title page, a rich crossroads document, to which we returnrepeatedly, that offers six paths out: "a graveyardi' "a journali "a quilt," "astory," "broken accents," and a list of sources. The graveyard, for example,takes us first to a patchwork image created by cutting and rearranging thetitle screen, after which we receive some directions and then reach the headstone,another overview or crossroads lexia that provides multiple patns;these paths take us to the lives of each of the beings, largely women, whoseparts contributed to the Patchwork Girl.