Plotting Markson's 'Mistress'

TL;DR

This paper employs text analysis and network visualization to explore the non-linear narrative structure of Markson's 'Wittgenstein's Mistress', aiming to enhance understanding through distant reading techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining entity recognition and network analysis to study the narrative's repetitive structures and their relation to critical themes.

Findings

Revealed patterns of repetition in the narrative

Connected narrative structures to thematic elements

Provided visualizations supporting literary analysis

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.