Outsider Theory

Description:


A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish
thinking as to dominant ideologies.

What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, speculative
feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey's finances, and maps drawn by asylum
patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before
in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on
an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously
— especially in an era of fake news — ideas that might otherwise be discarded or
regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. 

Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne
challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones,
addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the
work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether
amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. 

Considering the work of a variety of such figures — from popular occult writers and
gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists — Eburne argues that an
understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of
ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or
marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and
continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of
specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the
o