Shelley Jackson

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Shelley Jackson 2005 in New York

Shelley Jackson (* 1963 ) is an American writer and artist who is known for her cross-genre experiments, including her hyperfiction work Patchwork Girl (1995). In 2002 she published short stories, The Melancholy of Anatomy , and a novel in 2006, Half Life .

Life

Shelley Jackson was born in the Philippines in 1963 but grew up in Berkeley , California . Her parents had a small bookstore for women there for several years. She later recalled: "I was already in love with books by then .... and the family store just confirmed what I already suspected, that books were the most interesting and important things in the world. Of course I wanted to write them ! ". She graduated from Berkeley High School and received her Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University . Shelley Jackson then did a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from Brown University . She describes herself as a "student in the art of digression". In 1987 Shelley Jackson married the author Jonathan Lethem , from whom they divorced in 1998. She taught at the New School in New York City .

Patchwork Girl and Hypertext Literature

During her time at Brown University, she was tutored by the representatives of electronic literature , Robert Coover and George Landow . During one of Landow's lectures in 1993, Shelley Jackson began painting a naked woman with scars in the form of dotted lines in her notebook. This image later expanded into her first hypertext novel called Patchwork Girl . She later explained why she never wanted to publish Patchwork Girl in print:

"I guess you could say I want my fiction to be more like a world full of things that you can wander around in, rather than a record or memory of those wanderings. The quilt and graveyard sections [of the hypertext], where a concrete metaphor that resonates with the themes of the work creates a literary structure, satisfy me in a very corporeal way. I salivate, my fingers itch. "

As a non-chronological reinterpretation of Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein , Patchwork Girl was published by Eastgate Systems in 1995 and became their best-selling CD-ROM title, as a hybrid CD . Today Patchwork Girl is considered a groundbreaking work in hyperfiction . Marie-Laure Ryan writes about Patchwork Girl that the click of the reader symbolizes the work on a quilt and that the quilting theme can in turn be read as an allegory of postmodern narration in which a text is composed of disparate elements that are found elsewhere have been used before. Ryan finds many intertextual allusions and thinks that Patchwork Girl is characterized by the fact that the nature of this medium is reflected both in the narrative parts and in the form of theoretical considerations. In addition, the reader's symbolic stitching mimics the actions of the two female characters. The heroine Mary Shelley creates a female monster from body parts of different women. And the work of the author in turn is imitated insofar as Jackson creates a narrative identity for the monster, which is constructed from the stories of those women from whose bodies the fictional Mary Shelley assembles her monster.

While working at a bookstore in San Francisco , California , she published two other hypertext works. On the one hand, the autobiographical My Body (1997) and The Doll Games (2001), which she wrote with her sister Pamela.

Short stories

In the late 1990s, Shelley Jackson ended up hypertexting in favor of short stories (such as The Paris Review or Conjunctions ) and children's books. She later designed the cover and inner illustrations for Kelly Link's two short story collections Stranger Things Happen (2001) and Magic For Beginners (2005) .

In 2002 she published her first collection of short stories, The Melancholy of Anatomy . A year later Shelley Jackson started her Skin Project , which she described as the "mortal work of art": a short story which was written exclusively in the form of tattoos on the skin of volunteers, each given only one word.

novel

Her novel Half Life is about a disappointed Siamese twin named Nora Olney who plans to kill her other twin. Half Life was published by HarperCollins in 2006 and won the 2006 James Tiptree, Jr. Award for science fiction and fantasy .

Works

Hypertexts

  • Patchwork Girl (1995)
  • My Body (1997)
  • The Doll Games (with Pamela Jackson, 2001)

Books

other projects

  • Skin (beginning of 2003)
  • Mécanique Museum
  • The putti
  • Wrestlemania
  • Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lynch, Megan. "A Conversation with Shelley Jackson," Bold Type 5 May 12, 2002. Retrieved May 25, 2010.
  2. ↑ Rachel Metz: Book Review: A 'Melancholy' Body of Stories Fleshes Out Our Worst Somatic Fears . In: The Daily Californian . April 2002. Archived from the original on March 14, 2007. Retrieved on May 25, 2010.
  3. ↑ http://www.eastgate.com/people/Jackson.html
  4. ↑ Edemariam, Aida. "The borrower" , The Guardian , June 2, 2007. Retrieved on 25 May, 2010.
  5. ↑ a b c "Stitch Bitch: The hypertext author As cyborg femme Narrator" , Mark Amerika March 15, 1998. Retrieved on 25 May, 2010.
  6. ↑ D'Erasmo, Stacey. "My Sister and Me" , The New York Times , August 13, 2006. Retrieved on 25 May, 2010.
  7. ↑ Patchwork Girl , Electronic Literature Organization , 2001. Retrieved May 25, 2010.
  8. ^ Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium, in: A Companion to Narrative Theory , edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Blackwell Publishing, Malden / Massachusetts and Oxford 2005, paperback edition 2008, ISBN 978-1-4051-1476-9 Table of contents , page 515-528, this on page 523-524.
  9. ↑ http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html
  10. ↑ Review by Lance Olsen , electronicbookreview.com
personal data
SURNAME Jackson, Shelley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Philippines