Plotting Markson’s “Mistress”

Conor Kelleher, Mark Keane


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
W17-2205
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2205
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2205
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Conor Kelleher and Mark Keane. 2017. Plotting Markson’s “Mistress”. In Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 33–39, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Plotting Markson’s “Mistress” (Kelleher & Keane, LaTeCH 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2205.pdf