suggestions for col49 and theory of systems

[Dave Monroe]

Tabbi, Joseph.  Cognitive Fictions.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.

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.

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/T/tabbi_cognitive.html

See Ch. 2, "Mapping the Cor(e)tex(t): Thomas Pynchon,"
pp. 25-53, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0212&msg=73496

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0212&msg=73572

Citing ...

Luhmann, Niklas.  Social Systems.
   Trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker.
   Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995 [1984].

Also, e.g., ...

Tabbi, Joseph. "Merging Orders: The Shaping
   Influence of Science on 'Entropy.'"
   Pynchon Notes 15 (1984): 58–68.

__________.  "Pynchon’s 'Entropy.'"
   The Explicator 43.1 (1984): 61-3.

__________.  Rev. of "Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia
   and Social Control.  Papers From the Warwick
   Conference," Pynchon Notes 34-35 (Spring-Fall
   1994).  Studies in the Novel 20.3 (Fall 1988)

http://www.altx.com/EBR/reviews/rev5/tabbi.htm

__________.  "The Wind at Zwölfkinder:
   Technology and Personal Identity in Gravity's
   Rainbow." Pynchon Notes 20–21 (1987): 69–90.

--- Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:

> this is just to mention that Luhmann has long been
> an important thinker for Joe Tabbi (U of Ill at
> Chicago), much of whose work focuses on Pynchon.
> See for example "Cognitive Fictions". Joe's a
> friendly guy.

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