ENGLISH

Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason

By Gunnar Olsson

Book information

Year
2007
ISBN
0226629309, 9780226629308
Open Library ID
OL10192716M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
4 MB (3746512 bytes)
Pages
584\568
Topic
Art Graphic Arts
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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 Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails.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. (20061024)

Similar books