Overview

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives. A spectacular reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience—to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art.

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9780226629308

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"""Abysmal is a massive undertaking that captivates the reader at every twist and turn. To read each chapter is to experience a heady, sparkling flow of thought in action from a scholar who has devoted his life to asking what it is to live in the world; what it is to be human."" - John Pickles, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"""

Abysmal is a massive undertaking that captivates the reader at every twist and turn. To read each chapter is to experience a heady, sparkling flow of thought in action from a scholar who has devoted his life to asking what it is to live in the world; what it is to be human. - John Pickles, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Author Information

Gunnar Olsson is professor emeritus of geography at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of ten books in Swedish and English.

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