Theory for the World to Come
Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future?
Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead.
Rather than merely diagnosing problems, both these modes of thinking pose ‘necessarily unsettling’ questions about alternative worlds and how to bring them into being (100). This is also the modus operandi of Theory for the World to Come, which treats its source material as a repository of possible paths forward, and of tools to chart them. Wolf-Meyer succeeds at this task in admirable fashion, and in doing so provides a study that is likely to be of significant interest to students and scholars working in the cultural and literary disciplines, those whose inclinations are theoretical and especially those working at the intersections of these areas.
LSE Review of Books
Tags
Theory and Philosophy, Anthropology, 2019 Native American and Indigenous Studies catalog, 2019 Fall, 2019 American Studies catalog, 2020 Humanities and Arts catalog, 2019 Social Sciences catalog, 2020 Social Sciences catalog, AAA 2020, AAA philosophy and theory, MLA 2021, MLA Forerunners Series, MLA Philosophy, MLA Theory, MLA Literary Criticism
The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities.
$10.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0780-8
$4.95 ISBN 978-1-4529-6159-0
116 pages, 5 x 7
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minnesota, 2012).
Rather than merely diagnosing problems, both these modes of thinking pose ‘necessarily unsettling’ questions about alternative worlds and how to bring them into being (100). This is also the modus operandi of Theory for the World to Come, which treats its source material as a repository of possible paths forward, and of tools to chart them. Wolf-Meyer succeeds at this task in admirable fashion, and in doing so provides a study that is likely to be of significant interest to students and scholars working in the cultural and literary disciplines, those whose inclinations are theoretical and especially those working at the intersections of these areas.
LSE Review of Books
Theory for the World to Come... packs a punch and has gained a considerable following ever since its publication in 2019.
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