Sianne Ngai: Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)

“The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate 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 process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness 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 simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.

Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2012
ISBN 0674046587, 9780674046580
344 pages
via batshave

Reviews: Rebecca Ariel Porte (LA Review of Books, 2012), Paul Ardoin (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2013), Jason Gladstone (Contemporary Literature, 2014), Pansy Duncan (Cultural Studies Review, 2014), Monica Westin (The Believer, 2012), Hua Hsu (Slate, 2012), Douglas Dowland (American Studies, 2014).
Commentary: Adam Jasper (Bookforum, 2013).
Interview with the author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet, 2011)

Publisher

PDF, PDF (14 MB, no OCR, Index missing, updated on 2019-6-23)

Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957–) [EN, PT, ES]

Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, Frye reconceived literary criticism as a total history rather than a linear progression through time.

Literature, Frye wrote, is “the place where our imaginations find the ideal that they try to pass on to belief and action, where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the joy of life.” And the critical study of literature provides a basic way “to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye’s mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye’s criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 1957
383 pages

Selected reviews (1956-59)
Review (Graham Nicol Forst, Canadian Literature, 2003)
Review (Frank Kermode, The Review of English Studies, 1959)

Publisher (EN)
Wikipedia (EN)

Anatomy of Criticism (English, Third printing, 1973, 19 MB), View online (HTML)
Anatomia da crítica (Portuguese, trans. Péricles Eugênio and Silva Ramos, 1973, 21 MB)
El camino critico (Spanish, trans. Miguel Mac-Veigh, 1986, essays 1-3 only, 21 MB)
Anatomy of Criticism (English, Fifteenth printing, with a new Foreword by Harold Bloom, 2000)

Barbara Cassin (ed.): Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2004–) [FR, EN]

“This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy–or any–translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages–English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas.”

The book has been or is in the process of being translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Portuguese (5 Vols, scheduled 2009-11), Romanian (scheduled 2013), Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian (3 Vols, 2009-13, (2), (3)).

First published in French as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Seuil/Le Robert, Paris, 2004.

English edition
Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski
Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2014
Translation/Transnation series
ISBN 0691138702, 9780691138701
1344 pages

Untranslatables and their Translations (Barbara Cassin, Transeuropéennes, 2009, in French, English, Arabic and Turkish)
Commentary (Jacques Lezra, video, 12 min, 2014, in English)
Wikipedia (FR)

Project website (archived)
Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

Vocabulaire européen des philosophies – Échantillon IMAGE (French, HTML version of 30 entries related to the notion of image)
Dictionary of Untranslatables (English, EPUB, PDF)