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.
Tabela de Conteúdo
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.
Sobre o autor
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.