Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages.
Sianne Ngai has written an important book which harks back to the
heyday of the leftist literary theory of the 1980s, and is none the
worse for that. Dense and demanding, occasionally meandering, [it
is] equally at home with I Love Lucy and conceptual art, Theodor
Adorno and Jim Carrey… Laudable and ambitious… In order for art to
fulfill its role and for criticism to survive, ‘aesthetic theory’
needs to develop new and powerful concepts which reflect both art’s
changing nature and its ubiquity. This challenging and important
book takes the first steps in this task.
*Times Literary Supplement*
It’s the type of book that contains ideas that are broadly
provocative, even for the ‘merely interested.’ It is one of the
most useful guides to the present I’ve read in a while, almost
despite itself. It offers a way of thinking about so many forms of
present-day self-expression, from the prevalence of first-person
writing on the Internet to the ‘Like/Share’-this cheer of social
networks. It helps explain a certain style of art (Tao Lin, for
example) that advances on muted, subdued, contingent feelings.
*Slate*
[Ngai’s] wide-ranging, synthetic approach is exactly the kind of
criticism our ever-accreting culture deserves, and maybe even the
criticism we need. By indexing the kinds of feeling-based judgments
we make in our daily lives, Ngai opens up questions about how
emotions can act in social contexts more generally, how our private
experiences might shape our political and economic discourses.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Ngai argues that traditional aesthetic concepts of the beautiful
and the sublime are inadequate in our post modern hyper-commodifed
culture. She’s really on to something.
*Times Literary Supplement*
A book of immense interest.
*Daily Beast*
Ngai argues that three aesthetic categories usually considered of
minor importance are crucial to understanding contemporary culture.
The categories in question, the zany, the cute, and the
interesting, ‘are best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience
has been transformed by the hypercommodified,
information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late
capitalism.’ In defense of this thesis, Ngai deploys a formidable
grasp of the aesthetic theories of Schlegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, and
Cavell, among many others. Her knowledge of more recent pop culture
is equally wide ranging: readers will especially find illuminating
her discussion of the zany Lucille Ball. Ngai aims to show how
production, circulation, and consumption in contemporary capitalism
are mirrored in the cultural world. She argues that the importance
of the three marginal categories requires a revision of classical
aesthetics. We need not abandon the beautiful and the sublime, but
we need to give attention as well to what best enables us to
understand today’s culture, thus lessening the gap between
aesthetic theory and practice… Highly recommended for an academic
audience interested in cultural and aesthetic theory.
*Library Journal*
Sianne Ngai gives us once again a radiantly idiosyncratic study of
that which we never thought to examine and that which we now
understand to be crucial to our daily experience as social beings.
Under Ngai’s quick eye and deft hand, the zany, the cute, and the
merely interesting reveal their pertinence for the history and
historicity of aesthetic development, the intimacy between
quotidian materiality and philosophic inquiry, and the collisions
among modernity, art, labor, and performing bodies.
*Anne A. Cheng, author of Second Skin*
Sianne Ngai’s new book is a major work of aesthetic theory:
challenging a beauty-based aesthetics, closing the gap between
aesthetic theory and artistic practice, and offering irreverent
categories that work across disciplines and periods to make better
sense of our cultural experience. Our Aesthetic Categories takes up
the mantle of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and here Ngai becomes the
leading cultural critic of our day.
*Jonathan Culler, Cornell University*
This wonderfully original book (I hesitate to call it ‘cute, zany,
and interesting,’ but that wouldn’t be wrong) invents fresh and
incisive new categories for that tired old study called aesthetics.
Maybe such categories could even transform the field itself, but
they certainly transform the way we look at contemporary literature
and culture (which Sianne Ngai knows with startling extensiveness),
and maybe they will also end up transforming our outlook on the art
of the past as well. Our Aesthetic Categories is in any case one of
the most exciting new theoretical books to come along in some
time.
*Fredric Jameson, Duke University*
With unparalleled originality, ambition, and insight, Sianne Ngai
reimagines aesthetic theory for our time. Building on her work in
Ugly Feelings, Ngai insists on the significance of minor, ordinary
aesthetic experience. Our Aesthetic Categories displaces the
centrality of beauty in aesthetics and illuminates the social
processes at work in ubiquitous and taken-for-granted acts of
judgment. This book will make you feel the present differently.
*Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania*
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