Ugly Feelings

Sianne Ngai

Published by Harvard University Press 2004

Ugly Feelings

Sianne Ngai

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674041523

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Reviews

Strikingly original… A sweeping yet fine-grained analysis of the aesthetics of negative emotions such as envy, anxiety, irritation and paranoia.
-- David Trotter London Review of Books

The book’s worth lies in its ambition, even its overreach. This is no cultural-studies grab-bag: Ms. Ngai really is breaking new ground.
-- Benjamin Lytal New York Sun

Wow! That is almost all that I have to say about Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. This is an amazing book, stunning in its depth and range, exemplary in its learning, and almost continually surprising in its inventiveness. Ngai seems to have read and seen almost every text and movie, and not just read and seen but imagined or reimagined them with dazzling intensity. And she writes a clear, precise prose replete with striking antitheses and inventive analogies. Most important for me, Ngai is the best-read theorist I have ever encountered—for her scope and even more for her ability to find the perfectly opposite argument to engage or to extend as she develops her own case.
-- Charles Altieri Contemporary Literature

Ugly Feelings is a thought provoking book in the aesthetics of negative feelings with insightful reflections upon the social and experiential impact of artistic creations.
-- Dina Mendonça Metapsychology

One of the most intellectually dazzling and wide-ranging critical studies to appear in years. This is, in fact, far more than a book about emotions. Taken chapter by chapter, it is a series of commanding readings of notoriously ‘unfriendly’ texts… At its broadest, [it] entails a rejection of Jameson’s influential notion of ‘the “waning” of negative affect’ in late modernity or postmodernity, replaced by a glossily untroubled surface. Instead, Ngai asserts, we should recognize the consistent pockmarking of that surface by ugly feelings… Where other readings tend to see the ugly feelings in books…as a problem to get past—an indication, say, of ‘repression’—Ngai, characteristically, treats them in productive terms, as generative of the text’s overall ‘tone’… To the extent there is a critical capacity to the ugly feelings she describes, then, it would seem to lie in their ability to make emotional quagmires from which we might rather turn away matter deeply to us. On an intellectual level, then, this is precisely the feat performed by Ngai’s wonderful book.
-- Jennifer L. Fleissner Modernism/modernity

The book is rewarding for the originality of its perspective.
-- G. D. MacDonald Choice

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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. tone Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	38
2. animatedness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
3. envy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
4. irritation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	174
5. anxiety Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
6. stuplimity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	248
7. paranoia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	298
afterword: on disgust Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	332
notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	407

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 432
Keywords: tone; anxiety; negativity; identification; aggression; animation; body; capitalism; mood; heidegger; fredric jameson; language; postmodernism; object; projection; repetition; subjectivity; sublime; thrownness; passivity; weak; capitalism

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674041523