Solitary Inventions: David Markson at the End of the Line

Tabbi, Joseph

doi:10.1353/mfs.1997.0066

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The very last reference to Reader in Reader's Block directly precedes Nietzsche's assertion, "In the end one experiences only one's self" (p. 193). Critic and friend Joseph Tabbi (1997) concludes that Markson's elaborate system of "displacement" enables him to set down biographical details selectively, to monitor them, and to consider intractable, real-life issues-not least the prospect of suicide as a way out of solitude and failing health-while maintaining an altogether necessary ambiguity (necessary, one can only suppose, to the writer's concern for his actual mental state) over whether such realities need actually apply to one's self.…”

Section: Autothanatog R Aphy and Autob Iog R Aphymentioning

confidence: 99%

Collage autothanatographies

Drąg

2021

Orbis Litterarum

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This article argues that David Markson’s four last works, often referred to as a quartet or a tetralogy (1996–2007), and Evan Lavender‐Smith’s From Old Notebooks (2010) can be classified as collage autothanatographies. Both authors construct their formally experimental books out of brief snippets that combine personal meditations on death with various facts, anecdotes, and self‐reflexive comments. What grants those fragmentary texts a degree of unity is their concern with mortality: the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” reverberates throughout Markson’s tetralogy while Lavender‐Smith’s narrator announces that “death is the glue that holds the book together.” The article begins with an examination of the collage structure of both works. The formal analysis is followed by a discussion of the ways in which the works in question meet the generic criteria of both autobiography and autothanatography. The concluding part asserts the formal predisposition of collage to represent experiences of personal crisis such as an acute fear of death.

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Section: Autothanatog R Aphy and Autob Iog R Aphymentioning

confidence: 99%

Collage autothanatographies

Drąg

2021

Orbis Litterarum

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M arkson, D avid

Tabbi¹

2010

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth‐Century Fiction

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Author of The Last Novel (2007), David Markson (born in Albany, New York in 1927) might better be thought of as the last modernist author. Even the justifiable claim to have created with this book “his own personal genre” reinforces the modernist compulsion to “make it new” with each and every project. At the same time, Markson in this self‐declared “last book” makes a point of including, among the literary and art‐historical citations that comprise his late works, a list of plagiarisms, repetitions, direct quotations, and reported misquotations. The “new” appears in a context of rewritings, bowdlerization, anticipation, and recycling throughout the literary canon.

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David Markson: This Is Not a Novel (2016)

Axelrod-Sokolov

2021

Untheories of Fiction

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Solitary Inventions: David Markson at the End of the Line

Cited by 4 publications

References 4 publications

Collage autothanatographies

Collage autothanatographies

M arkson, D avid

David Markson: This Is Not a Novel (2016)

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