The Resonance of Unseen Things

By Susan Lepselter,

Book cover of The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny

Book description

The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the "uncanny" persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Resonance of Unseen Things as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Lepselter is a scholar of folklore and anthropology as well as a lyrical and compelling writer.

This book is based on a series of interviews she performed with those who have claimed encounters with UFOs and their occupants. In a series of compassionate, rigorous, and detailed readings of the very words these people have told her, Lepselter unpacks the deep anxieties, blessings, and emotions that run through their tales, and gracefully links them to broader national stories that afflict all of us.

Fear of disempowerment, worry about captivities of many sorts, confusion about the powers that run our world. Lepselter…

From Matthew's list on understanding the UFO phenomenon.

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