Ugly Feelings

Name: Ugly Feelings
Brand: Unknown
SKU: 9780674024090
Price: 61.99 NZD
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By Sianne Ngai

Summary

Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai investigates the subtle, less celebrated negative emotions like envy, irritation, paranoia, and disgust, which contrast with more overtly powerful feelings such as anger. These 'minor' affects reveal much about the nature of late modernity, particularly where action is impeded. Ngai explores their cultural and political significance across diverse contexts—from feminist academic debates and the Harlem Renaissance to American poetry and Hollywood film. Through analyses of works by Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Alfred Hitchcock, and others, she demonstrates how art uses these uncomfortable emotions to question its own subdued agency within a market-driven culture.
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Format: Paperback / softback

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Ugly Feelings

$61⁹⁹

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This insightful and scholarly examination appeals especially to readers interested in literary studies, cultural and media studies, feminist theory, aesthetic theory, and anyone curious about the political and cultural roles of emotions in modern art and society.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism.

Ugly Feelings tries to be many things in every chapter: a rhetorical reading of a set of 'marginal' avant-garde or popular texts, a deconstructive critique of 'blind spots and antimonies' in the way contemporary theory has approached a given problematic, and an articulation of a 'cultural predicament,' all through an exemplification of an affective quality that most commentators usually shy away from because of its 'minor' tone and 'negative' force. This is a most ambitious agenda--and one that Ngai succeeds admirably in carrying out. The analyses are beautifully crafted, complex without being convoluted, each judiciously drawing upon an appropriate subset of an impressive range of theoretical resources and cultural references. Although the book presents itself primarily as a contribution to literary and media studies, its impact will extend much further. In addition to developing highly original readings of its chosen texts, it reexamines pivotal political-cultural issues, concerned in particular with representations of gender and race, through a new revitalizing affective lens. In the uniqueness of the approach, familiar debates take on new life. The sustained engagement with affect and emotion, coupled with deconstructive technique, gives the book a certain unity across the differences in subject matter and the cultural-theoretical issues tackled by each chapter. -- Brian Massumi, author of Parables for the Virtual

Description

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called animatedness, and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called stuplimity. She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television.

Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Critically acclaimed for its originality and depth, Ugly Feelings is praised as a groundbreaking work by scholars such as David Trotter of the London Review of Books and Benjamin Lytal of the New York Sun. Charles Altieri from Contemporary Literature highlights Ngai's exceptional erudition, inventive argumentation, and clear prose, describing the book as stunning and thought-provoking. The text is widely recognised for its sweeping yet precise analysis of the aesthetics of negative emotions.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780674024090

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 01 March 2007

Country: United States

Imprint: Harvard University Press

Illustration: 36 halftones

Audience: Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 24.0mm

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 210.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 432

Collections

Education & Reference Non-Fiction Sianne Ngai

About the Author

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at Stanford University.

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