Big Culture
Toward an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Published on 5. September 2025
Book
Hardback
248 pages
978-0-226-84290-5 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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 ChicagoMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Illustrations
45 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-84290-5 (9780226842905)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
David Wittenberg is professor of English and Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. His books include Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative.
Content
1. Fear of Bigness
2. Postulates of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Taxidermy
What Is Big Is Too Big
What Is Big Is Small
Uncompromising Bulk
3. Unsublimity: The Atomic Bomb
The Bomb Is Too Big
Middle Distance
The Sublime
The Bomb Is (Too) Small
Marketable Euphemism
4. Antinomy of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Could Be Bigger
Size Is Relative
Size Is Absolute
5. Hyperfacticity: The Big-Budget Film
Waste
Monster
Toy
Scale Is a Euphemism About Size
6. Macrophilia: The Bigness of the Body
Microscopical Vision
Our Ravish'd Eyes
7. Racism: The Bigness of Michael Brown
Hulk Hogan
To Cry Like Children
Super-Predator
8. Architecture Without Space: The Skyscraper
Automatic Architecture
Cartographical Vision
The Value of Monotony
Weapon
Barad-dur
9. Disaster: The Titanic
Live News
Expenditure Spectacle
Monad
Monstrous Day Residue
10. Living with Bigness: Kazuo Shinohara
Against Comfort
Against Space
Against Security
The House Is Bigger Than the City
11. Perception and Illusion
Bigness Before Size
Moon Illusion
Man in the Street
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
2. Postulates of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Taxidermy
What Is Big Is Too Big
What Is Big Is Small
Uncompromising Bulk
3. Unsublimity: The Atomic Bomb
The Bomb Is Too Big
Middle Distance
The Sublime
The Bomb Is (Too) Small
Marketable Euphemism
4. Antinomy of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Could Be Bigger
Size Is Relative
Size Is Absolute
5. Hyperfacticity: The Big-Budget Film
Waste
Monster
Toy
Scale Is a Euphemism About Size
6. Macrophilia: The Bigness of the Body
Microscopical Vision
Our Ravish'd Eyes
7. Racism: The Bigness of Michael Brown
Hulk Hogan
To Cry Like Children
Super-Predator
8. Architecture Without Space: The Skyscraper
Automatic Architecture
Cartographical Vision
The Value of Monotony
Weapon
Barad-dur
9. Disaster: The Titanic
Live News
Expenditure Spectacle
Monad
Monstrous Day Residue
10. Living with Bigness: Kazuo Shinohara
Against Comfort
Against Space
Against Security
The House Is Bigger Than the City
11. Perception and Illusion
Bigness Before Size
Moon Illusion
Man in the Street
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index