Cognitive Fictions

by Joseph Tabbi

Overview

The first comprehensive look at the effect of new technologies on contemporary American fiction

Bringing together cognitive science and literary analysis to map a new "media ecology," Cognitive Fictions limns an evolutionary process in which literature must find its place in an artificial environment partly produced and thoroughly mediated by technological means. Joseph Tabbi provides a penetrating account of a developing consciousness emerging from the struggle between print and electronic systems of communication.

Central to Tabbi’s work is the relation between the arrangement of communicating "modules" that cognitive science uses to describe the human mind and the arrangement of visual, verbal, and aural media in our technological culture. He looks at particular literary works by Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, David Markson, Lynne Tillman, Paul Auster, and others as both inscriptions of thought consistent with distributed cognitive models, and as self-creations out of the media environment.

The first close reading of contemporary American writing in the light of systems theory and cognitive science, Cognitive Fictions makes needed sense of how the moment-by-moment operations of human thought find narrative form in a world increasingly defined by competing and often incompatible representations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816635573
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	06/27/2002
Series:	Electronic Mediations , #8
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Joseph Tabbi is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Introduction	ix
1.	A Media Theory of the Unconscious	1
2.	Mapping the Cor(e)tex(t): Thomas Pynchon	25
3.	Fiction to the Second Powers	54
4.	Solitary Invention: Observing Auster's Observations	77
5.	David Markson at the End of the Line	99
	A Media Migration: Toward a Potential Literature	119
	Notes	145
	Works Cited	153
	Index	159