JOSEPH TABBI is an American academic and literary theorist who relocated to the University of Bergen in 2019. 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: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (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). He edited The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2017), and Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (2020). He continues to co-edit the scholarly journal electronic book review (ebr), which he founded in the mid-1990s with Mark Amerika and Anne Burdick.

Tabbi is also a founding member and Director of the Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL). A National Endowment for the Humanities grant (2014) enabled member literary databases worldwide to build a search engine for interoperability. An earlier, startup grant from the NEH, for the development of the Electronic Literature Directory, provided a model for later databases worldwide that are now a part of the Consortium. A “manifesto” for the project can be found at www.cellproject.net.

His Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism is scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2024.

Academic book chapter

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2021). Is Writing All Over, or Just Dispersed? Essayism in Trina: A Design Fiction. (external link)
• Joseph Tabbi (2019). Digital Readings. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2012). Present Prophesy: The Transformation of Romantic Rhetoric in an by New Media. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2007). American World-Fiction in the Longue Durée. (external link)

Academic monograph

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2002). Cognitive Fictions. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2024). Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism. (external link)

Academic article

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (1999). The Medial Turn. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2011). World-Systems Colliding: Thomas Pynchon and Niklas Luhmann. (external link)
• Rui Torres; Scott Robert Rettberg; Jill Walker Rettberg et al. (2023). Digital Narratives — Theories, Criticism(s), Achievements: Introduction. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2010). Electronic Literature as World Literature; or, The Universality of Writing under Constraint. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2011). Cognition Against Narrative: Six Essays on Contemporary Cognitive Fiction. (external link)

Book anthology

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2020). Post-Digital: Dialogues and debates from Electronic Book Review (Volume 2). (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2024). The Cambridge introduction to literary posthumanism. (external link)
• Joseph Tabbi (2017). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. (external link)

Media feature article

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2019). Postmodern Sublime in Context. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2009). On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature: Preliminary Reflections. (external link)

Journal review

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2004). Confronting Chaos. (external link)

Lecture

• Joseph Paul Tabbi; Anna Nacher; Lai-Tze Fan et al. (2025). electronic book review's 30th Anniversary. (external link)

Non-fiction book chapter

• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2010). Cognitive Science. (external link)
• Joseph Paul Tabbi (2010). E-Literature. (external link)

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Books

Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism. 

Cambridge University Press, 2024.

 

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

Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015.

2015 Midlands Award for Biography.

 

Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

 

Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

 

Edited essay collections

Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from the electronic book review (2 volumes);

 Bloomsbury Press, London and New York, 2020.

 

Handbook of Electronic Literature.

London and New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017.

2018 N Katherine Hayles Award for Critical Writing  and Choice Outstanding Academic Title

 

Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World-System

Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2007: co-editor and sole author of introduction.

 

Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997: co-editor with Michael Wutz and co-author of introduction.