Introduction
The physical erasure of one text by another still ranks as one of the most dramatic 'textual effects' of the digital revolution. And most of us see this everyday as we surf the web. Or do we?

Click a link. The old text disappears.
But erasure?

Back buttons, the almost-certainty of reloading & the super search engine have reworked web-based hypertext into a system of reclaimable, re-readable, permanent pages. This is the technology of the book delivered electronically, the sacrifice of performance for reference.

The Storyspace software, which Shelley Jackson used to compose Patchwork Girl, stages textual performance. What passes is past - irretrievable. Or it passes, and repasses, and repasses - a Groundhog Day text which refits the reader as stumbling Bill Murray.

A George Mason student who read this book in 1997 wrote, "It is as if the story were alive...' [nice use of the subjunctive, by the way]. And each reader encounters a different life encoded in the performance.

Analyzing a textual performance is like reviewing a theatrical performance. The text enables the performance, but never ever constitutes the performance. The performance happens. And that happening, which demands the reader/viewer's participation, constitutes the critical text we ask you to analyze.

You are in the front row, not in your favorite armchair, as you analyze.
You are on stage, the director/actor, as you write.
We'll practice all this is class.

• Compose a performative text of your own which analyzes critically one aspect of Patchwork Girl.
  
• Take a position vis a vis a significant (to you) aspect of the text:
  • interpret a theme
  • analyze one (or related) aspects of the figuarative language
  • break down the technicalities of performance
  • interpret linking stategies and how they change
  • analyze the interface
  • investigate the relationship between text and image (images in the text, images of the text, images in the performance)
  • do something we haven't imagined
• Analyze the paths ( or scenes) that constitute performance
  
• Use apposite quotation from the text(s) you encounter, and (brief, relevant) descriptions of performative processes (local or global) that create meaning
  
• You should write c.1000 words, scattered across at least five screens (lexias) and post the draft and final versions of your analysis to your class web page
  

• Read first
• You cannot highlight this kind of text and return to read your highlighted sections later. Take notes as you read - every time you read - and include them in your journal. What happens as you read is as important as what you read. Keep notes on that, too.
• Keep notes of the textblocks you visit so that you can identify individual textblocks and, perhaps more importantly, the paths that constitute 'scenes' in performance.
• Always include the title of the textblock (or lexia) from which a quotation or idea emerges.
  
• Don't restrict yourself to quickly to one theme or idea. Stay alert to the emergent.
  
• Here are some ideas of what might emerge, shaped, inevitably, by our own predispositions and obsessions
  
• Keep notes, diagrams, drawings of what you yourself might create.
  
• Keep everything electronically to take advantage of the flexibility of the medium