Cognitive FictionsBringing 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. Book jacket. |
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aesthetic Auster autopoiesis autopoietic becomes brain Cary Wolfe characters cited cognitive fictions cognitive science communication complex connections consciousness contemporary critical cultural cybernetics David Markson Discourse Networks distinction distributed cognition Edelman and Tononi electronic emergence experience function Galatea 2.2 global Gold Bug Gravity's Rainbow human hypertext imagined Invention of Solitude Jameson journal journalist Kate Kate's Kittler knowledge language literary literature loop Mason & Dixon material Mathews's meaning media environment medium mental mind narrative narrator never notation novel novelists object Oedipa one's Paul Auster poem possible postmodern Powers Powers's produced protagonist Pynchon re-entry Reader's Block readers reading realism reality recognize representation Richard Powers self-consciousness social space story Strickland structure sublime symbolic systems theory textual thinking Thomas Pynchon thought Three Farmers tion unconscious unity Vineland Vollmann Wittgenstein Wittgenstein's Mistress words writing York Trilogy