Document Type
Article
Abstract
David Markson is a writer who in a series of "novels" entitled Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Reader's Block (1996), and This is not a Novel (2001) explores some of our basic conceptions of genre. Can we call a book of fragments a novel? Is a novel still a novel when the characters are given names such as Author, Protagonist, Reader? What are we left with, when critics resort to labels such as "novel of intellectual reference and allusion . . . minus the novel", or "seminonfictional semifiction" to categorise his texts? Through an apparently endless list of anecdotes and facts regarding the deaths of composers, authors, philosophers, etc., Markson, designs a topos of the graveyard where his fiction can rest. I intend to offer a reading of these texts as postmodern epitaphs, both evoking the tradition of epitaphic writing, and playfully subverting our expectations of this genre.
Repository Citation
Elias, Camelia. "The Graveyard of Genre: David Markson's Postmodern Epitaphs." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss1/2