Plotting Markson's 'Mistress'
This work addresses literary scholars interested in computational methods for analyzing complex narratives, but it is incremental as it builds on prior close reading efforts.
The authors tackled the challenge of analyzing the non-linear narrative in David Markson's 'Wittgenstein's Mistress' by applying distant reading techniques, including text analysis and entity recognition, to identify repetitive structures and relate them to existing critical analysis.
The post-modern novel 'Wittgenstein's Mistress' by David Markson (1988) presents the reader with a very challenging non linear narrative, that itself appears to one of the novel's themes. We present a distant reading of this work designed to complement a close reading of it by David Foster Wallace (1990). Using a combination of text analysis, entity recognition and networks, we plot repetitive structures in the novel's narrative relating them to its critical analysis.