Big Culture

Toward an Aesthetics of Magnitude

David Wittenberg

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English

University of Chicago Press
13 September 2025

Theory of art; Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology; Philosophy: aesthetics

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.

By: David Wittenberg
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 313g
ISBN: 9780226842929
ISBN 10: 0226842924
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 13 September 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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-dûr 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

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 for Big Culture: Toward an Aesthetics of Magnitude

“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 Chicago