作者简介

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.

内容简介

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities. Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.


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.

下载地址

豆瓣评论

  • Manchild
    提议几种新的美学范畴以应对“晚期资本主义”社会中的信息、商品以及表演对审美经验的改造。里面提到卡维尔的段落基本都还是奥斯丁的日常语言。11-07
  • Yinanaa
    Intro. Aesthetic judgement is not about the properties of the object but the relations of subjective capacities and intersubjective predispositions; zany as a performative labor, interesting as a weak evalution with potentials, cute as middle class familial or maternal relation. The commodity is always already permeated with its sentimentality. 12-22
  • Freiheit!
    She is so well read and smart!! (Though my top1 Ngai book is still Ugly Feelings). In one event she talked about the difference between her style of thinking and writing and Lauren Berlant’s style of thinking and writing (反正我磕到了), and it’s just so evident when one gets to read more of her work lol07-28
  • 世相
    Mark intro01-25
  • 西湖藕粉
    太强了改天来补个书评05-15

猜你喜欢

大家都喜欢