Abstract

"[C]ritics after [Susan] Strehle and [John] Johnston will go on to map further cultural migrations of literature into science and technology, not only in such evident heirs to Pynchon as Vollmann, Wallace and Powers, but also in narratives further afield that, with no obvious thematic reference to science, nonetheless illustrate its rippling cultural effects" (Joseph Tabbi, "The Medial Turn," Pynchon Notes 42–43 [1998]: 317). Four years later, Joseph Tabbi's own intellectually challenging, very stimulating Cognitive Fictions provides evidence of what its author had presaged in Pynchon Notes. The investigation into how "print narrative might … recognize itself, at the moment when it is forced to consider its own technological obsolescence, as a figuration of mind within the new medial ecology" (CF xi) dedicates extensive chapters to Pynchon and Powers. Another chapter presents a superb analysis of the "fictional observations" of Paul Auster, and yet another offers a series of critical considerations of the considerations and, subsequently, the re-considerations of David Markson's writer figure Kate in Wittgenstein's Mistress, who re-enters "her life-narrative, so that what she had once presented (to no one in particular) as a writer, she can now revisit as a reader" (109).

How to Cite:

Arich-Gerz, B., (2003) “Mindful Pleasure”, Pynchon Notes , 216-219. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.61