Central to Joseph 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 consistent and 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.
Joseph Tabbi is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.