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 Rus se ll Lowell Prize. Her work has been translate d into multiple languages.
内容简介
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They do mi nate 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 pro cess the hypercommodified, mass- media ted, performance- drive n world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai e xplore s how each of these aesthetic categories express es conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, e x change, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our play fulness 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 simulta neo usly. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our compl ex relationship to performing, info rmation, and commodities. Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photo graphy books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide tr action to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the one s 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.
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