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| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Theory of the Gimmick Sianne Ngai, 2020-06-16 Christian Gauss Award Shortlist Winner of the ASAP Book Prize A Literary Hub Book of the Year “Makes the case that the gimmick...is of tremendous critical value...Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.” —New Statesman “One of the most creative humanities scholars working today...My god, it’s so good.” —Literary Hub “Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life...Highly original.” —4Columns “It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing...is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.” —Bookforum “A page turner.” —American Literary History Deeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Ugly Feelings Sianne Ngai, 2007-03-01 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. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Theory of the Gimmick Sianne Ngai, 2020-06-16 Acclaimed critic Sianne Ngai theorizes the gimmick as an aesthetic category reflecting the fundamental laws of capitalism. Gimmicks make promises of saving labor and increasing value that we distrust but also find attractive. Exploring the use of this form, Ngai shows how its aesthetic dissatisfactions reflect deeper anxieties about capitalism. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Our Aesthetic Categories Sianne Ngai, 2012 The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Topological Imagination Angus Fletcher, 2016-04-04 In a bold and boundary defining work, Angus Fletcher clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining literature and topology—a branch of mathematics—he maps the ways the imagination’s contours are formed by the spherical earth’s patterns and cycles, and shows how the world we inhabit also inhabits us. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Benjamin's -abilities Samuel Weber, Walter Benjamin, 2010-08-10 “There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts. Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings. Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: In Praise of Athletic Beauty Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 2006 This book looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, and also strives for a language that can frame the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. Gumbrecht argues that the fascination with watching sports is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Philosophy’s Artful Conversation D. N. Rodowick, 2015-01-05 Theory—an embattled discourse for decades—faces a new challenge from those who want to model the methods of all scholarly disciplines on the sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books Miguel Tamen, 2012-10-30 This comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art takes its technical vocabulary from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is ridiculous to think of poems, paintings, or films as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about other relevant matters. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Abolish the Family Sophie Lewis, 2022-10-04 What if we could do better than the family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition. Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation David L. Eng, Shinhee Han, 2019-01-17 In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Premises Werner Hamacher, 1999 Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself, wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. In Premises Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable--and thus operates as a structural imperative--but is also unattainable and therefore by necessity open to possibilities other than that defined as position, to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of the merely thetical act. Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical reading, Hamacher presents the fullest account of the vast disruption in the theories and ethics of positional and propositional acts--a disruption first exposed by Kant's analysis of the minimal requirements for linguistic and practical action. Focusing on the double trait of every premise--that it is promised but never attained--Hamacher analyzes nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of positing acts in Fichte and Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals. There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach. Reviews Werner Hamacher's Premises is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American departments of comparative literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet, Premises is no more a work of literary scholarship than one of philosophical submission to philosophy. With the gesture that is genuinely called post-structural, which is the suspicion and suspension of every code, the book's act of freedom is freedom to read and write language tout court. --Timothy Bahti, University of Michigan Hamacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon which the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book. --Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: New Media, Old Media Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Thomas Keenan, 2006 In this history of new media technologies, leading media and cultural theorists examine new media against the background of traditional media such as film, photography, and print in order to evaluate the multiple claims made about the benefits and freedom of digital media. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Chinese Atlantic Sean Metzger, 2020-05-05 In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape—both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Golden Gulag Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 2007-01-08 Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called the biggest prison building project in the history of the world. Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the three strikes law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Think Tank Aesthetics Pamela M. Lee, 2020-03-17 How the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism. In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks—including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics—paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians. Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an “Opsroom” for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences Philip Fisher, 1998 Instead, Fisher argues, a detailed familiarity, similar to knowing our way around a building or a painting, is the ultimate meeting point for aesthetic and scientific encounters with novelty, rare experiences, and the genuinely new. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Our Broad Present Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 2014-05-27 Considering a range of present-day phenomena, from the immediacy effects of literature to the impact of hypercommunication, globalization, and sports, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes an important shift in our relationship to history and the passage of time. Although we continue to use concepts inherited from a historicist viewpoint, a notion of time articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actual construction of time in which we live in today, which shapes our perceptions, experiences, and actions, is no longer historicist. Without fully realizing it, we now inhabit a new, unnamed space in which the closed future and ever-available past (a past we have not managed to leave behind) converge to produce an ever-broadening present of simultaneities. This profound change to a key dimension of our existence has complex consequences for the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital media has eliminated our tactile sense of physical space, altering our perception of our world. Gumbrecht draws on his mastery of the philosophy of language to enrich his everyday observations, traveling to Disneyland, a small town in Louisiana, and the center of Vienna to produce striking sketches of our broad presence in the world. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Emigration and Caribbean Literature Malachi McIntosh, Wanna, 2016-04-29 During and after the two World Wars, a cohort of Caribbean authors migrated to the UK and France. Dissecting writers like Lamming, Césaire, and Glissant, McIntosh reveals how these Caribbean writers were pushed to represent themselves as authentic spokesmen for their people, coming to represent the concerns of the emigrant intellectual community. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Ironheart Vol. 2 , 2020-02-04 Riri Williams has been dealing with a lot close to home, but now she is going global! From the Sanctum Santorum to Wakanda, Riri teams up with some of your favorite Marvel characters as she follows the trail of Midnight's Fire. But what does the mysterious Ten Rings organization have planned for Ironheart? COLLECTING: IRONHEART 7-11 |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Reification Timothy Bewes, 2020-05-05 Of all the concepts which have emerged to describe the effects of capitalism on the human world, none is more graphic or easily grasped than reification-the process by which men and women are turned into objects, things. Arising out of Marx's account of commodity fetishism, the concept of reification offers an unrivalled tool with which to explain the real consequences of the power of capital on consciousness itself. Symptoms of reification are proliferating around us-from the branding of goods and services to racial and sexual stereotypes, all forms of religious faith, the growth of nationalism, and recent concepts like spin and globalization. At such a time, the term ought to enjoy greater critical currency than ever. Recent thinkers, however, have expressed deep reservations about the concept, and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social societies. Eschewing this trend, Timothy Bewes opens up a new formulation of the concept, claiming that, in the highly reflective age of late capitalism, reification is best understood as a form of social and cultural anxiety: further, that such an understanding returns the concept to its origins in the work of Georg Lukcs. Drawing upon writers including Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Proust and Flannery O'Connor, he outlines a theory of reification which promises to unite politics with truth, art with experience, and philosophy with real life. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Postcolonial Exotic Graham Huggan, 2002-09-26 Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Transcritique Kojin Karatani, 2005-01-14 Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital. Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club Anna Kornbluh, 2019-05-02 Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marxist film theory. Fight Club is an exceptionally useful text with which to explore these three concepts because it so vividly and pedagogically engages with economic relations, ideological distortion, and opportunities for transformation. At the same time, it is a very typical film in terms of the conditions of its production, its marketing, and its popularity. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film is a contemporary classic that has lent itself to significant re-interpretation with every shift in the political economic landscape since its debut. Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club models a detailed cinematic interpretation that students can practice with other films, and furnishes a set of ideas about cinema and society that can be carried into other kinds of study, giving students tools for analyzing culture broadly defined. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant, 2022 Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world, focusing on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Novel and the New Ethics Dorothy Hale, 2020-11-10 For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question, Why write? has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics--including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen--champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This new ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the new idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred upon the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Birth of Theory Andrew Cole, 2014 Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole s The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel s dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book will revitalize dialectics for the twenty-first century. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Fall of Robespierre Colin Jones, 2021 The day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge, 2019-08-23 The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Matter of Capital Christopher Nealon, 2011-04 Christopher Nealon’s reexamination of North America’s poetry in English, from Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden to younger poets of the present day, argues persuasively that the central literary project of the past century was to explore the relationship between poetry and capitalism—its impact on individuals, communities, and cultures. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Affective Mapping Jonathan FLATLEY, Jonathan Flatley, 2009-06-30 The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Everything and Less Mark McGurl, 2021-10-19 As the story goes: Jeff Bezos left a lucrative job to start something new in Seattle only after a deeply affecting reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. But if a novel gave usAmazon.com, what has Amazon meant for the novel? In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl discovers a dynamic scene of cultural experimentation in literature, with a confidence that rivals modernism. Its innovations have little to do with how the novel is written and more to do with how it's distributed online. On the internet, all fiction becomes genre fiction, which is simply another way to predict customer satisfaction. With an eye on the longer history of the novel, this witty, acerbic book tells a story that connects Henry James to E.L. James, Faulkner and Hemingway to contemporary romance, science fiction and fantasy writers. Reclaiming several works of self-published fiction from the gutter of complete critical disregard, it stages a copernican revolution in how we understand the world of letters: it's the stuff of high literature - Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, and Amitav Ghosh - that revolve around the star of countless unknown writers trying to forge a career by untraditional means, Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica being just one fortuitous route. In opening the floodgates of popular literary expression as never before, the Age of Amazon shows a democratic promise, as well as what it means when literary culture becomes corporate culture in the broadbest but also deepest and most troubling sense. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Financial Imaginary Alison Shonkwiler, 2017-02-14 As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by neoliberalism and globalization, increasing financial abstraction has presented a new political urgency for contemporary writers. Globalized finance, the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and the emergence of new technologies pose a similar challenge to the one faced by American social realists a century ago: making the virtualization of capitalism legible within the conventions of the realist novel. In The Financial Imaginary, Alison Shonkwiler reads texts by Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Teddy Wayne, and Mohsin Hamid to examine how fiction confronts the formal and representational mystifications of the economic. As Shonkwiler shows, these contemporary writers navigate the social, moral, and class preoccupations of American “economic fiction” (as shaped by such writers as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser), even as they probe the novel’s inadequacies to tell the story of an increasingly abstract world system. Drawing a connection from historical and theoretical accounts of financialization to the formal contours of contemporary fiction, The Financial Imaginary examines the persistent yet vexed relationship between financial representation and the demands of literary realism. It argues that the novel is essential to understanding our relation to the mystifications of abstraction past and present. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Applied Ballardianism Simon Sellars, 2018-04-13 An existential odyssey weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm. The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future… Fleeing the excesses of 1990s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality. Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space. An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score Josefine Wikström, 2022-04 This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in Art Theory, Performance- and Dance Studies. Practices of Relations in Event-Score and Task-Dance Practices will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioner across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Scary Monsters Michelle de Kretser, 2021-10-19 From the twice-winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Scary Monsters is an affecting, profound and darkly funny exploration into racism, misogyny and ageism. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD WINNER OF THE 2023 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE FOR FICTION 'A novel of luminous intelligence and profound depth, written with verve, humour and exceptional elegance.' - Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane When my family emigrated it felt as if we'd been stood on our heads. Michelle de Kretser's electrifying take on scary monsters turns the novel upside down - just as migration has upended her characters' lives. Lili's family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a teenager. Now, in the 1980s, she's teaching in the south of France. She makes friends, observes the treatment handed out to North African immigrants and is creeped out by her downstairs neighbour. All the while, Lili is striving to be A Bold, Intelligent Woman like Simone de Beauvoir. Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and embraces 'Australian values'. He's also preoccupied by his ambitious wife, his wayward children and his strong-minded elderly mother. Islam has been banned in the country, the air is smoky from a Permanent Fire Zone, and one pandemic has already run its course. Three scary monsters - racism, misogyny and ageism - roam through this mesmerising novel. Its reversible format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when changing countries changes the story of their lives. With this suspenseful, funny and profound book, Michelle de Kretser has made something thrilling and new. Which comes first, the future or the past? Praise for Scary Monsters: 'A radically brilliant diptych-novel, in complex conversation with itself and with the world we live in, written by one of the living masters of the art of fiction. A beautifully troubling book.' - Max Porter, author of Lanny 'Bold, spare and completely original. One of the most exciting contemporary novels I've read for a very long time.' - Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young 'Written with incandescent moral energy, boundless compassion, and astonishing precision and beauty, Michelle de Kretser's Scary Monsters extends the very possibilities of the novel form. On the contemporary international scene, there are very, very few writers who can match her style, her intelligence, her vision. To read her is to be changed.' - Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others 'In Scary Monsters de Kretser addresses the weightiest of subjects with the lightest and deftest of touches, and the result is funny, playful, painful, angry and, above all, ferociously smart. It's a dazzling novel, by a hugely talented author.' - Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests 'Scary Monsters is a marvel. Each of the two very different parts of the novel had me totally riveted, intensely absorbed, wowed by de Kretser's scathing accuracy--whether she's chronicling youth's delights and distortions or a future where prosperity is the new unethics. It's a wildly remarkable book that unfolds like no other.' - Joan Silber, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Improvement 'I love the way Scary Monsters asks urgent questions about what kind of future we might be sleepwalking towards. And heightens the enquiry by looking back; by unsettling and disturbing our sense of where we are now and where we are headed by dissecting - with exquisite deftness - the barely-concealed misogyny and racism of then, to awaken our senses to now. It's a novel of luminous intelligence and profound depth, written with verve, humour and exceptional elegance.' - Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: The Bottle Imp Robert Louis Stevenson, 1980 |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Risible Delia Casadei, 2024-02-06 A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century’s development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Futures of Literary Studies Tim Lanzendörfer, Mathias Nilges, 2024-08-30 This book brings together essays that ask how one may chart more productive engagements with the methodological foundations of literary studies, a discipline that is finding itself in a moment of severe crisis. The temptation to reduce methodological debates to method wars constitutes one of the main obstacles for what ought to be the common goal of our discipline: to articulate the possible and indeed necessary futures of literary studies. How do we think about the future of literary studies in the funerary climate that has engendered the belief that we need to fight our internal wars for survival? How might (must?) our understanding of what literary criticism is and does change? How do we formulate possible futures for literary studies while grappling with the significant problems that our present poses? The chapters in this volume stage hopeful interventions that seek to contribute to the effort to explore the futures of literary studies by way of and conceived as a collective endeavor. Together, the authors advance a call for better, more useful, more active, more networked, and, yes, even for abandoned versions of the always multiple and joyously contradictory discipline that is called literary studies. This book will be beneficial to students and scholars of English literature, literary theory and literary studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice and are accompanied by a new Preface. |
| sianne ngai theory of the gimmick: Mother Media Hannah Zeavin, 2025-04-29 An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology. From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media. Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family. |
Sianne - Meaning of Sianne, What does Sianne mean?
[ syll. sian-ne, si-a-nne] The baby girl name Sianne is pronounced as SZH AA NN- †. Sianne's language of origin is Hebrew. Sianne is a form of the Welsh and English Siân. See also the …
Sianne - Name Meaning, Origin & Similar Names for a Baby Girl
Apr 14, 2025 · The name Sianne is believed to have originated from the Hebrew name "Shoshannah," which means "lily" or "rose." In some cultures, Sianne is also seen as a …
Sianne Ngai - Wikipedia
Sianne Ngai (pronunciation ⓘ) is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. From 2000 to 2007 she was an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, from …
Sianne - Baby name meaning, origin, and popularity - BabyCenter
See the popularity of the baby name Sianne over time, plus its meaning, origin, common sibling names, and more in BabyCenter's Baby Names tool.
Sianne - Name Meaning and Origin
It is derived from the Italian city of Siena, known for its medieval architecture and rich history. The name can also be traced back to the Latin word "sanguineus," meaning "blood-red," which …
Explore Sianne: Meaning, Origin & Popularity - MomJunction
Jun 14, 2024 · Explore the historical and cultural journey of the name Sianne. Dive through its meaning, origin, significance, and popularity in the modern world.
What Does The Name Sianne Mean? - The Meaning of Names
A user from Singapore says the name Sianne is of Welsh origin and means "God's gracious gift". According to a user from Australia, the name Sianne means "God provides". A submission …
Sianne - Christian Girl Name Meaning and Pronunciation
Sianne is a Christian Girl Name pronounced as see-AN and means God is gracious. The name Sianne is of Welsh origin, derived from the Welsh name Sian, which itself is a shortened form …
Sianne: In-Depth Name Meaning, Popularity Trends, and More ...
Aug 17, 2024 · Sianne is a feminine name of Hebrew origin, meaning "God is gracious". It is a variant of the name Susannah, which itself is derived from the Hebrew name Shoshana, …
Sianne - Nice Baby Name
Sianne is a feminine given name of English origin. It is a variant of the name Sienna, which is derived from the Italian city of Siena. The name Sianne is associated with beauty, grace, and …
Sianne - Meaning of Sianne, What does Sianne mean?
[ syll. sian-ne, si-a-nne] The baby girl name Sianne is pronounced as SZH AA NN- †. Sianne's language of origin is Hebrew. Sianne is a form of the Welsh and English Siân. See also the …
Sianne - Name Meaning, Origin & Similar Names for a Baby Girl
Apr 14, 2025 · The name Sianne is believed to have originated from the Hebrew name "Shoshannah," which means "lily" or "rose." In some cultures, Sianne is also seen as a …
Sianne Ngai - Wikipedia
Sianne Ngai (pronunciation ⓘ) is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. From 2000 to 2007 she was an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, from …
Sianne - Baby name meaning, origin, and popularity - BabyCenter
See the popularity of the baby name Sianne over time, plus its meaning, origin, common sibling names, and more in BabyCenter's Baby Names tool.
Sianne - Name Meaning and Origin
It is derived from the Italian city of Siena, known for its medieval architecture and rich history. The name can also be traced back to the Latin word "sanguineus," meaning "blood-red," which …
Explore Sianne: Meaning, Origin & Popularity - MomJunction
Jun 14, 2024 · Explore the historical and cultural journey of the name Sianne. Dive through its meaning, origin, significance, and popularity in the modern world.
What Does The Name Sianne Mean? - The Meaning of Names
A user from Singapore says the name Sianne is of Welsh origin and means "God's gracious gift". According to a user from Australia, the name Sianne means "God provides". A submission …
Sianne - Christian Girl Name Meaning and Pronunciation
Sianne is a Christian Girl Name pronounced as see-AN and means God is gracious. The name Sianne is of Welsh origin, derived from the Welsh name Sian, which itself is a shortened form …
Sianne: In-Depth Name Meaning, Popularity Trends, and More ...
Aug 17, 2024 · Sianne is a feminine name of Hebrew origin, meaning "God is gracious". It is a variant of the name Susannah, which itself is derived from the Hebrew name Shoshana, …
Sianne - Nice Baby Name
Sianne is a feminine given name of English origin. It is a variant of the name Sienna, which is derived from the Italian city of Siena. The name Sianne is associated with beauty, grace, and …
