This publication is presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services
University of Chicago Press
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
Big Culture
Toward an Aesthetics of Magnitude
-
David Wittenberg
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
A philosophical exploration of our relationship to large objects and their outsized psychological effects.
Big Culture asks a simple question: why do big things give us big feelings? Skyscrapers, disasters, and other large phenomena can elicit fear, attraction, and awe. David Wittenberg argues that these feelings cannot be explained through objects’ size alone. Instead, he contends that an encounter with bigness is a primal, even violent sensation like little else that we experience in our well-proportioned adult lives.
Drawing on examples as commonplace and as singular as atomic bombs, cinematic effects, pornographic “macrophilia,” monstrous creatures, and more, Wittenberg demonstrates how big things tap into our earliest experiences of the world, reigniting our most fundamental feelings about reality. In doing so, Wittenberg offers a new aesthetics of magnitude and of the special role that bigness plays in our everyday perception of objects and images.
Big Culture asks a simple question: why do big things give us big feelings? Skyscrapers, disasters, and other large phenomena can elicit fear, attraction, and awe. David Wittenberg argues that these feelings cannot be explained through objects’ size alone. Instead, he contends that an encounter with bigness is a primal, even violent sensation like little else that we experience in our well-proportioned adult lives.
Drawing on examples as commonplace and as singular as atomic bombs, cinematic effects, pornographic “macrophilia,” monstrous creatures, and more, Wittenberg demonstrates how big things tap into our earliest experiences of the world, reigniting our most fundamental feelings about reality. In doing so, Wittenberg offers a new aesthetics of magnitude and of the special role that bigness plays in our everyday perception of objects and images.
Author / Editor information
David Wittenberg is professor of English and Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. His books include Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative.
Reviews
“In this ambitious and strikingly innovative book, Wittenberg argues that the concept of ‘bigness’ is a formative response to the incalculably large and threatening that is repressed by the ‘adult’ system of measurement but reemerges to haunt us in aesthetic works. Ranging from representations of the atomic bomb and the sinking of the Titanic to works such as Pacific Rim and Gulliver’s Travels, Wittenberg produces profound and exciting insights about our relation to scale.”
— Mary Ann Doane, University of California, Berkeley“Big Culture’s big idea is that aesthetic judgments doggedly devalue bigness. In revaluation, Wittenberg refines the category of the big to the unsublime consistency of the object itself. Thus charging subjects engaged in criticism to do big better, the book offers enchanting illuminations of architectural wonders, cinematic blockbusters, atomic rhetoric, erotic bodies, and the moon. Critics, consumers, and other big heads will marvel.”
— Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois ChicagoTopics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
v -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
ONE Fear of Bigness
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
TWO Postulates of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
6 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
THREE Unsublimity: The Atomic Bomb
19 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
FOUR Antinomy of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
38 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
FIVE Hyperfacticity: The Big-Budget Film
54 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
SIX Macrophilia: The Bigness of the Body
70 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
SEVEN Racism: The Bigness of Michael Brown
77 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
EIGHT Architecture Without Space: The Skyscraper
86 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
NINE Disaster: The Titanic
121 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
TEN Living with Bigness: Kazuo Shinohara
139 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
ELEVEN Perception and Illusion
161 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Acknowledgments
175 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
177 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Bibliography
205 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
223
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 26, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780226842912
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226842912
Keywords for this book
bigness; scale; cinema; architecture; skyscrapers; disasters; Titanic; atomic bomb; Kazuo Shinohara; Washington Monument
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
