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Copyright

Lopamudra Saha; Ujjwal Jana;

Published On

2024-11-06

Page Range

pp. 209–224

Language

  • English

Print Length

16 pages

11. Hypertext as a ‘palimpsestuous’ construct

Analysing Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

Chapter of: Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India(pp. 209–224)
This chapter analyses how the hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995) functions as a palimpsest in its postmodern multimodal rewriting of the myth of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Since digital culture is one of the major postmodern offshoots, and the idea of the hypertext is the product of literary culture and digital innovations, new possibilities have been brought about that unsettle the traditional conceptualisation of the novel as the printed word. This chapter, therefore, proposes the study of the concept of the hypertext as ‘palimpsestuous’ relativity, with special reference to Patchwork Girl. To serve this purpose, the traditional idea of the ‘palimpsest’ as a parchment undergoes revision in the light of the affordances of multimedia. This enquiry also uncovers the changing dynamics of readership that the new media intervention has brought about. Finally, the discussion highlights how hypertextual rewriting induces the ideas of multivocality, fragmentariness, non-linearity and interactivity through the application of the inter-semiotic paradigm.

Contributors

Lopamudra Saha

(author)
Research Scholar at Pondicherry University
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0822-6569

Ms Lopamudra Saha is a Research Scholar in the Department of English, Pondicherry University, India. Her broader area of research is Digital Humanities with particular focus on Electronic Literature produced in India.

Ujjwal Jana

(author)
Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts at University of Delhi
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5940-8201

Dr Ujjwal Jana is Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Professor Jana’s areas of academic and research interest include Digital Humanities, Translation Studies, Disability Studies and Literary Studies with interdisciplinary orientation. Professor Jana was a Fulbright Scholar in Indiana University, Bloomington, USA in 2007–2008. He was a visiting faculty member in the Departments of English, Leipzig University, Germany and University of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2014 and 2017 respectively. He received Hungarian State scholarship awards in the academic year 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 funded by the Tempus Foundation of the Government of Hungary to carry out collaborative research projects. He was the Indian Principal Investigator of the SPARC (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration) sponsored International collaborative Project (2019–2023) on “Digital Humanities in the Indian Rim” in collaboration with Western Sydney University, Australia, funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. Professor Jana’s Bengali translation of Amit Chaudhuri’s Sahitya-Akademi-Award-winning English novel, A New World (2000) by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, was published in 2021. Presently he is the Indian Principal Investigator of another SPARC-sponsored International Project (2023–2025) on “Indian-European entanglements: exploring trans-cultural relationships through Digital Humanities”, to collaborate with Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. Ghent University, Belgium funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. He is currently carrying out a research project funded by the Indian Council of Historical Research, India on the 19th-century poet saint of Odisha, Bhima Bhoi, during 2024–2026. Professor Jana has edited an anthology on Digital Culture in Humanities: Contemporary Trends published by a Delhi-based publishing house in January 2023.