Sianne Ngai

Sianne Ngai
Born	October 3, 1971(1971-10-03) Washington, D.C., United States
Web	Aaaaarg, Wikipedia, Academia.edu, Open Library

Sianne Ngai (1971) is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. Her work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism. She is Professor of English at University of Chicago (since 2017). Previously, she was Professor of English at University of Stanford (2000-2007, 2011-2017). Ngai earned her B.A. and M.F.A. from Brown University, Providence, in 1993 and 1995, her PhD. from Harvard in 2000, and an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy in Humanities from the University of Copenhagen in 2015.

Her first book, Ugly Feelings (2005, Harvard UP) investigates the aesthetics and politics of non-prestigious, non-cathartic negative emotions—envy and irritation as opposed to anger and fear. Her second book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012, Harvard UP), argues for the contemporary centrality of three everyday, vernacular aesthetic categories, treating them with the same philosophical seriousness as others have treated the beautiful and sublime.

Works

Scholarly work

Books

• Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, 2005, 432 pp.

• Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Harvard University Press, 2012, 344 pp.
  • Vores æstetiske kategorier. Det gakkede, det nuttede og det interessante, trans. Peter Borum, Copenhagen: Information, 2021, 530 pp. [1] (Danish)

• Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, Harvard University Press, 2020, 416 pp.
  • Das Niedliche und der Gimmick: zwei ästhetische Kategorien, trans. Christina Dongowski, Berlin: Merve, 2021, 128 pp. [2] (German)

Book chapters, papers

• "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics", Postmodern Culture 10:2, Jan 2000. [3]
• "Bad Timing (A Sequel), Paranoia, Feminism, and Poetry", differences 12:2, Summer 2001, pp 1-46.
• "Jealous Schoolgirls, Single White Females, and Other Bad Examples: Rethinking Gender and Envy", Camera Obscura 16:2, 2001, pp 177-228. [4]
• "Moody Subjects/Projectile Objects: Anxiety and Intellectual Displacement in Hitchcock, Heidegger, and Melville", Qui Parle 12(2): "Poetics of New Meaning", Spring/Summer 2001, pp 15-55.
• "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust", in Telling It Slant: Avant-garde Poetics of the 1990s, eds. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
• "‘A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice’: Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject", American Literature 74:3, Sep 2002, pp 571-601.
• "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde", Critical Inquiry 31:4, Summer 2005, pp 811-847.
• "Competitiveness: from ‘Sula to Tyra’", Women's Studies Quarterly 34(3/4): "Envy", Fall-Winter 2006, pp 107-139.
• "Black Venus, Blonde Venus", in Bad Modernisms, eds. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. [5]
• "Merely Interesting", Critical Inquiry 34:4, Summer 2008, pp 777-817.
• "Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social", in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, eds. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, Columbia University Press, 2014.
• "Visceral Abstractions", GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21:1, Jan 2015, pp 33-63.
• with Lauren Berlant, "Comedy Has Issues", Critical Inquiry 43(2): "Comedy: An Issue", Winter 2017, pp 233-249.
• "Theory of the Gimmick", Critical Inquiry 43(2): "Comedy: An Issue", Winter 2017, pp 466-505.
• "Rødland's Gimmick", in Torbjørn Rødland: Fifth Honeymoon, eds. Steinar Sekkingstad and Axel Wieder, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018. Catalogue essay.

Poetry

• My Novel, Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994, 27 pp.
• Discredit, Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1997.
• TelepromptER*, Elmwood, CT: Potes and Poets Press, 1998, [22] pp.
• Criteria, Oakland: O Books, 1998, 79 pp.

Interviews

• Adam Jasper, "Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai", Cabinet 43: "Forensics", Fall 2011, pp 44-51.
• Matthew McQuillan, Matthew Clements, "Interview Conducted with Sianne Ngai", in Bottom Natures, London, 2015.
• Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Devika Sharma, "Kritikk ens fortsættelse: Interview med Sianne Ngai", Kultur & Klasse 122, 2016, pp 5-20. (Danish)
  • "Critique’s Persistence: An Interview with Sianne Ngai", Politics / Letters, 27 Feb 2017.
• Merete Røsvik Granlund, "Kapitalismens små gleder", Vinduet / Morgenbladet, 24 Jan 2017. (Norwegian)
• Matthew Rana, "Bad Contemporaneity. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai explains why art needs to embrace error in a world that is wrong", Kunstkritikk, 20 Aug 2021.
  • "Dålig samtid", Kunstkritikk, 20 Aug 2021. (Swedish)

Literature

• McKenzie Wark, "Our Aesthetics", Verso Blog, 27 Jun 2017.
• "Sianne Ngai (b. 1971)", in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al., New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.

Links

• Profile on U Chicago
• Academia.edu