David Markson and Count Tolstoy

Hyper-literate literature requires knowledge of classic texts and an awareness of and interest in popular culture.

In such literature one cannot help but think of the end; if any thinking is to be done it is the end that will be thought of.

The technique is to offer digression after digression while circling back to a main theme, and to offer ample opportunities for the reader to become the writer and the writer the reader.

Practical people are discouraged from either writing or reading hyper-literate literature, since practical people are discouraging.

A sentence such as the one written in David Markson's book, "Wittgenstein's Mistress," "In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with," is classically hyper-literate, depending as it does on the reader's ability to construct the story the writer is presenting so that a partnership between them is made and the story can reach its end.

"All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," is the way Tolstoy begins to tell the story of Anna Karenina, a sentence once read that tends not to be forgotten.