Scale in Literature and Culture

Description

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Introduction (Michael Tavel Clarke, David Wittenberg)....Pages 1-32 Front Matter ....Pages 33-33 Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene (Zach Horton)....Pages 35-60 Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (Derek Woods)....Pages 61-92 Anti-Zoom (Bruno Latour)....Pages 93-101 Front Matter ....Pages 103-103 Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong (Mark McGurl)....Pages 105-141 The Stature of Man: Population Bomb on Spaceship Earth (Joan Lubin)....Pages 143-175 Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural Reproductions (Aikaterini Antonopoulou)....Pages 177-199 Front Matter ....Pages 201-201 From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry Tide (Melody Jue)....Pages 203-224 World Literature as a Problem of Scale (Oded Nir)....Pages 225-251 Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s “Breeze Avenue Working Paper” (Bradley J. Fest)....Pages 253-280 Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction (Jeffrey Severs)....Pages 281-303 Back Matter ....Pages 305-323