TABBI, Joseph 1960-

PERSONAL:

Male. Born May 4, 1960, in Buffalo, NY. Education: Cornell University, B.S., B.A., 1983; University of Toronto, M.A., 1984, Ph.D., 1989.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, MC-162, University of Illinois, Chicago, 1912 University Hall, 601 South Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607-7100. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator and author. University of Illinois, Chicago, associate professor of English, 1989—. Editor, Electronic Book Review (www.altx.com/ebr).

WRITINGS:

Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1994.

(Editor with Michael Wutz) Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1997.

Cognitive Fictions ("Electronic Mediations" series), University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2002.

(Author of afterword) William Gaddis, Agape Agape, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor and author of introduction) The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, Penguin (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, SubStance, and Amerikastudien/American Studies; contributor to books, including Internet Culture, edited by David Porter.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Research on the book manuscript for Ecologies of Mind in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joseph Tabbi, an educator who specializes in contemporary fiction and the evolution of contemporary literary media, focuses much of his attention on the global changes being wrought on traditional literature by the advances in science and technology. Among his works are Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk and Cognitive Fictions, the latter a part of the University of Minnesota Press's ongoing "Electronic Mediations" series. Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, which Tabbi edited with Michael Wutz, contains twelve essays that focus on the way in which experimental literary narratives of twentieth-century authors such as Franz Kafka and William Faulkner reflect a shift in the concept of "literature" as a reaction to a greatly accelerated and multichanneled media. Reviewing the collection in Choice, K. Tölölyan praised the work as an "unusually coherent collection of uniformly good essays" that address the way "narrative and criticism have changed as the printed word has increasingly had to compete with other media." With a special interest in the writings of satirical novelist William Gaddis, Tabbi has also contributed the afterword to Gaddis's final novel, Agape Agape, and has edited a collection of the late author's nonfiction writings.

Postmodern Sublime critiques twentieth-century literature in light of the development of technological constructs that have evolved as a result of the proliferation of electronic media. Discussing the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, and Joseph McElroy, Tabbi investigates, in particular, what he terms the postmodern "technological sublime": "the realm of excess signification as the boundaries of discourse, the point at which meaning is overwhelmed and entropy threatens to take over." "What is at stake in all of this is imaginative literature's relationship to technological culture," Brian McHale explained in the American Book Review. "If, as Tabbi argues, romantic resistance to technology (Luddism of the imagination) is no longer viable, and literary mastery of technological culture is illusory, and postmodern irony is ineffectual ('Postmodern irony changes nothing. '), and complicity is an admission of ultimate failure, then what alternatives remain? No simple ones, is Tabbi's answer." Praising Tabbi's arguments, and his defense of certain works he believes to have been underappreciated, as "novel, piercingly accurate, and gratifyingly broad," Utopian Studies reviewer June Deery cited the author's discussion of his thesis as "intense and often courageous." Dubbing Tabbi's work "an intellectual page-turner," Gregory Comnes noted in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that Postmodern Sublime "represents an important and profound insight into the latest incarnation of the 'sacred natural order,' the technological sublime, and how one might live with it."

Tabbi's 2002 book Cognitive Fictions analyzes current American fiction from a perspective involving systems theory and other developing frameworks relating to human psychology. Focusing on the writings of experimentalist authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Richard Powers, and Lynne Tillman, Tabbi examines how such literature seeks to reconcile itself to the artificiality of the burgeoning electronic media while also retaining the human narrative. Praising the work for "breaking new ground" and making "a strong case" for the application of cognitive science to literary narrative, Review of Contemporary Fiction contributor Christian Moraru praised Cognitive Fictions as a thought-provoking study based "at the crossroads of fiction and postmodern studies, systems and electronic media theory, and cognitive science," while in Choice Tölölyan called the book a "first-rate study of the new era characterized by 'the circulation of meaning through multiple media'" that have expanded from print to include the Internet, film, and television.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Tabbi, Joseph, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1994.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, February, 1996, Brian McHale, review of Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, p. 20.

American Literature, March, 1996, Michael Wutz, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 278; June, 1998, p. 435.

Choice, September, 1998, K. Tölölyan, review of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, p. 118; May, 2003, K. Tölölyan, review of Cognitive Fictions, p. 1555.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 1997, Bernard Duyfhuizen, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 763.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 1996, Marc Redfield, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 852.

Modern Language Review, January, 1999, Wendy Wheeler, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 296.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1996, Gregory Comnes, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 184; spring, 2003, Christian Moraru, review of Cognitive Fictions, p. 166.

Science Fiction Studies, July, 1996, David Seed, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 288.

Studies in the Novel, spring, 2000, Matthias Konzett, review of Reading Matters, p. 100.

Technology and Culture, October, 1997, Joseph W. Slade, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 957.

Utopian Studies, winter, 1997, June Deery, review of Postmodern Sublime, p. 240.*