Joseph Tabbi

University of Bergen, Humanistisk Fakultet, Faculty Member

University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Medicine, English, Faculty Member

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Joseph Tabbi is an American academic and literary theorist. He has made significant contributions to the field of experimental American fiction in both print and electronic media. He is the author of "Cognitive Fictions" (2002) and "Postmodern Sublime" (1995). He was the first scholar granted access to the William Gaddis archives and is the author of "Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis" (2015).

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Joseph Carroll

University of Missouri - St. Louis

Jo Tondeur

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Owen Hodkinson

University of Leeds

McKenzie Wark

The New School University

Benjamin Noys

University of Chichester

Ben Woodard

Leuphana University

Simon O'Sullivan

Goldsmiths, University of London

John Clark

Loyola University New Orleans

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Pedro Serrano Gomes

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

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Papers by Joseph Tabbi

On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2010

... 479 Page 481. Joseph Tabbi| On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature 6. Bill Benzon: 25 ... more

The Sublime: Contemporary Perspectives.' Verslag van een forum

A Media Migration

Duke University Press eBooks, Jul 6, 2005

E-Literature

Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015

Cognitive Science

Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015

The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings

... Another example is Eve Andrée Laramée&amp;#x27;s spring 1999 installation at the MIT List... more

Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk

Modern Language Review, 1999

... Similarly, when Norman Mailer confronted space technologies directly in Of a Fire on the ... ... more ... Similarly, when Norman Mailer confronted space technologies directly in Of a Fire on the ... The circled passage appears on page 3. Those sentences that Mailer underlined read ... declassified British Intelligence documents) Werner Heisenberg&amp;amp;#x27;s complicity in, and later silence on ...

10. The Processual Page: Materiality and Consciousness in Print and Hypertext

Postmodern Sublime

Markson, David

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, Dec 24, 2010

Gaddis, William

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 2010

20. 1991, The Web: Network Fictions

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jun 28, 2006

Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis

During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922u1998) evaded biographical questions, never read from hi... more During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922u1998) evaded biographical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didnAEt allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Greenwich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market values into every corner of American culture. By illustrating the interconnectedness of GaddisAEs life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the odifficult authoro and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, TabbiAEs book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth centuryAEs seminal novelists.

Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer's (eds) 'Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media

American Studies in Scandinavia, 2001

About a year ago in a Times Literary Supplement review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk pra... more About a year ago in a Times Literary Supplement review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of US writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with 'news of a rare and real America' ('Closing time in the fun-house' 26). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann's red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen's inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers's intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace's mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of 'total operationality, hyperreality, total control' and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology's 'mortal deconstruction of the body' ('Simulacra' 121, 11 1, cited in Simulacrum America 6). To the contributors in Simulacrum America, however, Baudrillard's America is no less real than the vanishing spaces of the naturalist tradition; and its media representations are by now so familiar that they hardly count as news. Now that Roland Barthes's 'empire of signs' has been digitized, continental theory sounds less provocative, more descriptive of things as they are. What is new, however, and what separates this collection from mainstream critical writing, is the editors' recognition that, with the technologization of everything, criticism itself no longer looks the same: 'When the distance between the real and the imaginary begins to disappear,' they write, 'there is no longer any space for an ideal or critical projection' (6). And so, beyond the global understanding of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillard's hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what's left for criticism itself to do? When literature's most compelling historical fictions have 'long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination' (8) and when mass media imagery has made 'the very concept of "representation" ... problematic' (I), it makes little sense to think of

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Our Struggle: Reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp

1553-1139, 2019

A extensive (11,700 word) roundtable discussion edited and revised for scientific publication: th... more A extensive (11,700 word) roundtable discussion edited and revised for scientific publication: the authors consider the sometimes-frustrating but immersive experience of reading Knausgård's Min Kamp, its relation to modernism, postmodernism, banality, contemporary social media, and essayism, its relation to Northern European culture and "Norwegian-ness," Knausgård's portrayal of male identity, his extensive analysis of Hitler and his book, and its rhetorical significance during a period when many of the rhetorical moves described there are mirrored within the rhetoric of contemporary right-wing extremism

Digital Readings

Thomas Pynchon in Context

The sublime: contemporary perspectives

Graphic Sublime: On the Art and Designwriting of Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett

Digit. Humanit. Q., 2012

Post-Digital Debates and Dialogues from the electronic book review

The lively dialogue among the contributing authors, ebr's longest-serving and newly appointed... more The lively dialogue among the contributing authors, ebr's longest-serving and newly appointed editors, and the engaged and interested audience, which accompanied the Post-Digital / Dialogues and Debates book launch in September 2020, is an interesting insight into the recent debates on the multifaceted ramifications of digital disruption and the ways in which it has transformed our society, culture, and aesthetics. The discussion throws some light as well on the always fascinating history of the early electronic literature initiatives which had laid the groundwork for what eventually turned out to become the whole new field of intermedia literary practice and the sub-discipline of trans- and interdisciplinary academic inquiry. The authors of the mammoth 2-volume anthology recruit from the variety of contexts and offer diverse looks at the post-digital condition of our contemporaneity.

An Interview with Joseph Tabbi

NANO, 2015

This interview between Jeff Gonzales and Joseph Tabbi discusses Tabbi's new book of literary ... more This interview between Jeff Gonzales and Joseph Tabbi discusses Tabbi's new book of literary criticism Nobody Grew But the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis (Northwestern UP, 2015). The book effectively and compellingly demonstrates that Gaddis was deeply engaged with the continuing corporate reengineering of postwar American experience not just in 1976's J R, the Gaddis novel that deals most explicitly with corporations, but throughout his career.

On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2010

... 479 Page 481. Joseph Tabbi| On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature 6. Bill Benzon: 25 ... more

The Sublime: Contemporary Perspectives.' Verslag van een forum

A Media Migration

Duke University Press eBooks, Jul 6, 2005

E-Literature

Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015

Cognitive Science

Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015

The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings

... Another example is Eve Andrée Laramée&amp;#x27;s spring 1999 installation at the MIT List... more

Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk

Modern Language Review, 1999

10. The Processual Page: Materiality and Consciousness in Print and Hypertext

Postmodern Sublime

Markson, David

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, Dec 24, 2010

Gaddis, William

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 2010

20. 1991, The Web: Network Fictions

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jun 28, 2006

Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis

Elisabeth Kraus and Carolin Auer's (eds) 'Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media

American Studies in Scandinavia, 2001

Download

Our Struggle: Reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp

1553-1139, 2019

Digital Readings

Thomas Pynchon in Context

The sublime: contemporary perspectives

Graphic Sublime: On the Art and Designwriting of Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett

Digit. Humanit. Q., 2012

Post-Digital Debates and Dialogues from the electronic book review

An Interview with Joseph Tabbi

NANO, 2015

An Interview with Joseph Tabbi, Author of "Nobody Grew But the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis"

by Jeffrey Gonzalez and Joseph Tabbi

In the interview, we discuss Joseph Tabbi’s recent biography of William Gaddis, "Nobody Grew but ... more In the interview, we discuss Joseph Tabbi’s recent biography of William Gaddis, "Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis." The book offers a fresh reading of the author’s work in the context of the corporatization of American culture in the second half of the 20th century. As Tabbi notes in the interview, the very common categorizing of Gaddis as a postmodern author manifests a corporate logic: “Corporate culture likes nothing better than to turn all literary, aesthetic, affective, and cultural designations into passing fashions that readers can pick and choose and writers can argue about in a limited, highly professionalized way.” Tabbi argues that Gaddis’s work is best understood as exposing the fictionality of all the codes and rules that dominate cultural life by emphasizing the creation of those codes and rules: “our economic and cultural reality is already shot through with fictions and beliefs that sustain nation-states and corporations as much as religions,” but those fictions and beliefs take on a particularly corporate form in the “corporate lifeworld” of the American present. Gaddis’s novels, for Tabbi, are invested in “exploring ways to reform the technoculture from within, by discovering unrecognized potentials in its everyday details and operations.” In our conversation, we discuss Tabbi’s sense that the corporate lifeworld has rewritten the reception of literature in general and Gaddis in particular.

Joseph Tabbi

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