Post-Weird
Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream
$91.77
- Paperback
194 pages
- Release Date
11 November 2025
Summary
An ambitious look at rhetoric and psychosis that explores how communities form when society collapses
American society seems to have fractured. Common touchpoints of authority have receded in recent decades and beliefs that were once taboo are now openly shared, from neo-Nazism to occultism to conspiracy thinking. In this book, Calum Lister Matheson goes beyond the fraying of contemporary American culture to ask how splinter communities form in our current media envir…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781978840164 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1978840160 |
| Author: | Calum Lister Matheson |
| Publisher: | Rutgers University Press |
| Imprint: | Rutgers University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 194 |
| Release Date: | 11 November 2025 |
| Weight: | 286g |
| Dimensions: | 15mm x 152mm x 229mm |
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Critics Review
“Post-Weird is an intricate account of how radically different interpretations of potent symbols like ‘science’ are made possible by very similar psychic structures shaping our social worlds. Matheson produces a psychoanalytic rhetorical theory that adapts Jacques Lacan masterfully to our new media environment. Using cases as diverse as Sandy Hook denialists, snake handlers, and anti-trans rhetorical agents, Post-Weird asks readers to think about anti-rhetorical reading practices; at stake is our capacity to tolerate the actual, real ambiguity and contingency of being human in community with others.” - Eric King Watts, author of Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World
“Matheson raccoons through the recesses of internet subculture so we don’t have to. But to the reader’s surprise, Post-Weird illustrates the ubiquity of delusion by documenting how the fragmentation of consensus reality and the emergence of paranoid reading practices expose the anti-rhetorical psychotic structure that unites us in our difference.” - Casey Kelly, author of Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment
“Life is weird—and getting weirder. Matheson’s Post-Weird should be heralded a keystone in having anticipated, through careful attention to ‘fringe’ rhetorical communities, how weirdness envelops our culture and eventually comes for us all. With humor, sensitivity, and a critical eye, Matheson revivifies rhetorical concepts like propriety and dignifies psychoanalytic concepts like psychosis to help us better understand our mediated ‘weird’ age.” - Robert McDonald, author of Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life
Calum Lister Matheson
Calum Lister Matheson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh and faculty at the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age.
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