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Sianne Ngai is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar, and is a professor at the University of Chicago.
Ngai has published the books Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), and Ugly Feelings (2005), both released by Harvard University Press. Sections of both books have been translated into Swedish, Italian, German, Slovenian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. After her book Theory of the Gimmick was published in 2020, she was called "the most influential literary theorist of her time" in a feature on her work in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and "a star literary theorist" by Bookforum.
Career
Ngai earned her B.A. from Brown University in 1993 and her Ph.D from Harvard University in 2000. When her book Our Aesthetic Categories came out in 2012, she was professor at Stanford University where she worked from 2000–2007 and 2011–2017. She was associate professor at UCLA from 2007–2011.
Critical theory
Ngai studies the emotional gaps, contradictions, and negativities in literature, film, and theoretical writing in order to explore situations of suspended agency. She is also interested in the aesthetic judgements people make under capitalism.
Publications
Ugly Feelings (2005)
In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai constructs a theoretical framework for analyzing and mobilizing affective concepts and presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a range of cultural artifacts produced in what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer refer to in Dialectic of Enlightenment as the "fully administered world of late modernity."
In contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, non-cathartic states of feeling like envy, irritation, and paranoia are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.
Our Aesthetic Categories (2012)
In her book Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai argues that the zany, the cute, and the interesting, despite their marginality to aesthetic theory and to genealogies of postmodernism, are best suited to grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hyper-commodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.
Using the example of a frog-shaped baby's bath toy, Ngai illustrates that cuteness is an aestheticization of powerlessness, as the purpose of the cute bath toy is for it to be pressed against a baby's body, and squished in a way guaranteed to repeatedly crush and deform its formless face. The nonaesthetic properties associated with cuteness (smallness, compactness, formal simplicity, softness or pliancy) thus also index minor negative affects such as helplessness, pitifulness, and despondency. Ngai also argues that the term "cute" is a way of sexualizing beings while simultaneously rendering them unthreatening. She illustrates this by providing several examples of poems that deploy cuteness as a means of rendering the overtly aggressive and sexual dimension of the theme unthreatening.
Theory of the Gimmick (2020)
Her book Theory of the Gimmick argues that the "gimmick" is a crucial form for modern capitalist society, and is both an aesthetic category and an aesthetic judgement, where calling something a gimmick is a performative act. A gimmick is a gadget that flatters to deceive. The book explores the gimmick as encoding a relation to labor, and as the inverted image of the modernist "device" celebrated by Victor Shklovsky.
Extending the focus in Ngai's second book on the historical significance of the rise of equivocal aesthetic categories, Theory of the Gimmick explores the mix of attraction and repulsion produced by the gimmick across a range of forms specific to capitalist society. These include fiction by Mark Twain, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and Henry James; twentieth-century poetic stunts; the video installations of contemporary artist Stan Douglas; and philosophical fiction.
One reviewer noted that the book demonstrates that American cultural theory is capable of structural thinking and Marxist critique, while also firmly grounded in a cultural theory tradition. Another reviewer said that it feels more like a collection of essays than a cohesive argument.
Selected articles
- "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics," Postmodern Culture, vol. 10 no. 2, January 2000
- "Bad Timing (A Sequel), Paranoia, Feminism, and Poetry," differences, vol. 12 no. 2, September 2001
- "Jealous Schoolgirls, Single White Females, and Other Bad Examples: Rethinking Gender and Envy," Camera Obscura, vol. 16 no. 2, September 2001
- "Competitiveness: from ‘Sula to Tyra,'" Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 34 no. 3/4, Winter 2006
Awards
Ngai was the recipient of a 2007 Charles A. Rysamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2014–15. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen in 2015, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. Her book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting was the winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize (2012).