Getting Started with Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl

Patchwork Girl, like Neuromancer and eXistenZ, offers us one more pop-cultural representation and interpretation of the intersections of technology and "the human." However, because Patchwork Girl is a hypertext novel, and because hypertext requires very different reading strategies than the print novel, it may be a bit frustrating in the beginning. These reading strategies--hypertext literacy--may at first seem counter-intuitive, unnatural, but remember that there is nothing particularly "natural" about print literacy, either: literacies are learned. We'll need to learn from the text itself the best ways to approach it. A few tips:

Reading Hypertexts

Reading Hypertexts with Storyspace

Reading Patchwork Girl

Looking out for Major Themes