Scale in Literature and Culture (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies)

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. Acknowledgements 6 Contents 7 Editors and Contributors 9 List of Figures 12 Chapter 1 Introduction 14 The Sublime 17 The Anthropocene, Globalization, and the Politics of Scale 20 Urban Development, Architecture, and Film 26 Literature 29 Contents 32 Works Cited 40 Part I Scale: History and Conception 46 Chapter 2 Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene 47 The Anthropocene’s Universal Overview 47 The Microcosm: Healing the Trans-Scalar Body 53 The Serialized Cosmos 57 Short Circuiting the Overview: Medial Scale Jumping in Boeke’s Cosmic View 62 Conclusion: Humanity’s New Scales 67 Works Cited 70 Chapter 3 Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten 73 Smooth Zoom and Scale Variance 76 “They Appear in Quantum Motion as a Swarm of Shimmering Points” 79 Deorganization 81 Influence and Subjectivation 83 Operation and Description 86 Scalism 90 Epistemic Things from Other Scales 91 “At the Atomic Scale, the Interplay of Form and Motion Becomes More Visible” 96 Works Cited 101 Chapter 4 Anti-Zoom 105 Part II Scale in Culture 114 Chapter 5 Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong 115 Invisible Media 118 Every Man a King Kong 131 Postscript (2017) 144 Works Cited 150 Chapter 6 The Stature of Man: Population Bomb on Spaceship Earth 152 Works Cited 180 Chapter 7 Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural Reproductions 185 The Passion for the Real 185 Architectural Replication in China 189 Bigness 193 The Crystal Palace and the Berlin City Palace 194 The Crystal Palace and the Grand Interior 200 Place, Size, Scale 203 Works Cited 206 Part III Scale in Literature 208 Chapter 8 From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry Tide 209 Falling Water 211 Friction and Opacity 219 Saturation 224 Works Cited 228 Chapter 9 World Literature as a Problem of Scale 231 Varieties of World Literature 233 Conclusion 250 Works Cited 256 Chapter 10 Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s “Breeze Avenue Working Paper” 258 Theorizing Megatexts 258 Speculative Criticism: Writing, Hyperobjects, and the Imagination 265 The Megatext to Come 274 Works Cited 281 Chapter 11 Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction 286 Works Cited 306 Index 309 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