Scale in Literature and Culture [electronic resource] /
Tavel Clarke, Michael.editor.
Wittenberg, David.editor.
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.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1 Introduction -- 2 Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene -- 3 Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten -- 4 Anti-Zoom -- 5 Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong -- 6 The Stature of Man: Population Bomb on Spaceship Earth -- 7 Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural Reproductions -- 8 From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry Tide -- 9 World Literature as a Problem of Scale -- 10 Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper’ -- 11 Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction.
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.
Literature-Philosophy.
Critical theory.
Comparative literature.
Motion pictures.
Literary Theory.
Critical Theory.
Comparative Literature.
Film Theory.