In Human Scale - by Benjamin Morgan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An innovative account of how literature has helped bridge the gap between ordinary human experience and the vast scale of the natural world.

Is it possible to connect our lived experience of time to the vast eons of the planet's history? This question has perplexed writers and scientists for more than two hundred years, from Darwin's account of natural selection through contemporary writing about climate change. Benjamin Morgan's insightful study shows how literature of the nineteenth century helped readers leap from their everyday sense of time and space to the vast, inhuman scales of the natural world.

Exploring writings that range from Arctic voyage narratives to Thomas Hardy's novels, utopian fiction of the 1880s, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, and beyond, Morgan situates scalar incommensurability in its deeper intellectual and cultural contexts. Victorians struggled to grasp senses of proportion not only through time scales but also through scales of aesthetic magnitude, of relative value, of social totality, and of the planet's future. Morgan argues that a scale is not just a timeline; it is a way of finding order and proportion through many kinds of comparative measurement. His literary history of scale illuminates both the challenge of imagining the vastness of planetary time and the history of creating a human sense of proportion.

Review Quotes

"In Human Scale addresses a fundamental question of our time: Are human perception and understanding inevitably out-scaled by the vast and planetary crisis of climate change? Morgan's exploration of the human and the nonhuman in Victorian writings--geological texts on coal and ice, utopian and planetary novels by Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler, William Morris, H. G. Wells and others--yields some brilliant strategies for commensuration of that which often seems incommensurable."

"In Human Scale is a timely, original, and important work. It tackles head-on today's often recognized problem of incommensurability: How do we relate human experience, understanding, and individual consciousness of vulnerability to the terrifying vastness of climate change? Running through the book is the question of how, and why, scale has become such a crucial issue for the environmental humanities. This is no celebration of the human, however, but rather an interrogation of the place of human bodies and minds when it comes to establishing scalar relativity and dissonance."

"An ambitious and innovative book about scalar imaginaries, anthropocentrism, and literature, In Human Scale will change the conversation in literary studies and the environmental humanities. Morgan possesses a startling ability to express vast, complex ideas in the most lucid and understandable terms. A magnificent contribution by a virtuoso critic."

About the Author

Benjamin Morgan is professor in and chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where he is also a member of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization. He is the author of The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.