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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.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Michael Tavel Clarke is Associate Professor of English at University of Calgary, Canada.
David Wittenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, USA.
Summary
Emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to geocriticism, examining critical theory, film, and novels
Establishes key benchmarks for discussion on scale in literature Illuminates the historical, methodological, and social/political significance of scale
