Writing in the "Second Person Plural": Ben Lerner, Ambient Esthetics, and Problems of Scale. Issue 2 (15th March 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ivry, Henry
• Is Part Of: Critique. Volume 62:Issue 2(2021)
• Page Start: 123
• Page End: 136
• Publication Date: 2021-03-15
• Subjects: Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Letterkunde; Engels; Electronic journals; 809.304
• DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1787321
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0011-1619

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I examine the way that Ben Lerner confronts what I describe as the Anthropocene's problematic of scale. While the use of "scale" has become commonplace in recent environmental criticism, what scale actually means in terms of literary critique has been less clear. This article looks at three different ways that scale has been taken up by recent environmental critique, as a spatial, temporal, and esthetic term. I then argue that Ben Lerner's novels approach these three different valences of scale through the use of ambience, creating texts that are able to move across scales. It isn't that Lerner's work prioritizes any one scale, whether that is geologic or esthetic. Lerner's ambient writing, in effect, is able to understand how the large and the small work together co-constitutionally to create a literature for the Anthropocene.