Acknowledgments
Preface: Enemies of the Truth
Introduction
Part I. Alien Gods
1. The Library We’ve Been Waiting For: The Alien Knowledge of Nag
Hammadi
2. Gnostic Materialism
Part II. Mythomorphoses
3. So Dark, the Con of Man
4. The Chalice, the Blade, and the Bifurcation Point
Part III. Sovereign Institutions
5. Garveyism and Its Involutions
6. The Sade Industry
Part IV. Products of Mind
7. Cartographorrhea: On Psychotic Maps
8. Communities of Suspicion: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Laws of
Science
Coda: Thought from Outer Space
Notes
Index
Jonathan P. Eburne is associate professor of comparative literature, English, and French and Francophone studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime, coauthor of four other books, and editor of ASAP/Journal.
"A bracing challenge to academic squeamishness, Outsider Theory is
a learned, mischievous, and fascinating book that makes a
compelling argument for the positive role of fraud, failure, and
error in knowledge production. Outsider art, writing, and thinking
can no longer be neatly quarantined in isolated and eccentric
individuals, but must be recognized as thoroughly implicated in
mass culture, scholarship, laboratory work, and critical
theory."-John Wilkinson, University of Chicago"Jonathan P. Eburne
has written a generous, curious, rigorous book about ideas often
dismissed as ridiculous, embarrassing, and even dangerous. Outsider
Theory takes them seriously, which means subjecting them to the
same caliber of historical analysis and philosophical critique
usually reserved for ‘good’ ideas. In doing so, he launches us on
several fascinating voyages across what he calls ‘the oceanic
expanse of modern intellectual history.’"-Evan Kindley, author of
Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture"This timely book is
not only genuinely interesting, but makes a strong and original
contribution to the discussion concerning the future of the
humanities. Jonathan P. Eburne's study of questions of method is
itself an achievement of method, engaging with the outsiders not as
a cabinet of curiosities, but in a way that troubles thinking, and
especially thinking about thinking."-Margret Grebowicz, Tyumen
State University
"Scholars will find much to consider in Eburne’s methodological
innovations, and students will find Eburne’s case studies of
outsider theory to be fascinating explorations of how ideas, once
discarded, often have had a subterranean influence on contemporary
intellectual life."-CHOICE"Jonathan Eburne’s book encourages a
resolve to take as seriously and generously as he entertains every
strange invention and its productive errancy, even one’s drifting
thoughts on finally putting the book aside."-SubStance
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