Big Culture: Toward an Aesthetics of Magnitude

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.

David Wittenberg is professor of English and Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. His books include Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative.