Sianne Ngai: Ugly Feelings (2005)

“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.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2005
ISBN 0674015363, 9780674015364
viii+422 pages

Reviews: Jennifer L. Fleissner (Modernism/modernity, 2006), Jennifer Greiman (Leviathan, 2012), Eu Jin Chua (Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 2007), Dina Mendonça (Metapsychology, 2005).

Interview with author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet)
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-5-23)

David Green, Joanna Lowry (eds.): Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (2005)

“This collection of essays by leading photographic and film theorists considers the changing relationship between the still and moving image in contemporary culture. The photograph has traditionally been seen as a quintessentially still image. Its ability to freeze and hold a moment in time has been the source of its peculiar fascination and the foundation of much of the theoretical discussion about it. New technological developments in digital media, however, have fundamentally altered the ways in which we think about photography, in particular forcing us to reconsider our assumptions about the still and the moving image and their relationships to differing conceptions of time. Amongst the topics addressed in these essays are: the work of artists who extend the still image in time through the use of video or narrative sequencing; the aesthetic and philosophical analyses of stasis; the place of the pose and tableau in contemporary photography and film; the iconography of photography in cinema; the notion of the cinematic fragment and cultural memory.”

With essays by Victor Burgin, David Campany, Mary Ann Doane, Jonathan Friday, David Green, Yve Lomax, Joanna Lowry, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Garrett Stewart, and John Stezaker.

Publisher Photoworks / Photoforum, 2005
ISBN 1903796180, 9781903796184
183 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Sherry Turkle (ed.): Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007)

“For Sherry Turkle, “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.” In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.

These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume’s special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects–an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer–are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, “No ideas but in things.” The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.

Whether it’s a student’s beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes–the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.

In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner’s keyboards and Lev Vygotsky’s hobbyhorses; William Mitchell’s Melbourne train and Roland Barthes’ pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello’s glucometer and Donna Haraway’s cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262201682, 9780262201681
385 pages

Publisher

PDF