“much the way the proximity between real and virtual feeling in the concept of tone can produce anxiety for the literary theorist.” — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“In fact, the shot’s cunning re-objectivization suggests just how uncertain this surveillance expert’s grasp of the visual field has perhaps been all… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“In both cases, the difficulty lies not in the ontological difference between real emotion and virtual emotion, but rather in their proximity.” — Sianne Ngai Real emotion Copy Share Image
“Envy is, in a sense, an intentional feeling that paradoxically undermines its own intentionality.” — Sianne Ngai Envy Copy Share Image
“in my afterword, which discusses the ugliest of all ugly feelings: disgust. As” — Sianne Ngai Disgust Copy Share Image
“Melville’s last published novel, The Confidence-Man (1857), a notably “talky” text that offers a useful allegory of the very” — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“these audible demonstrations that whether the feeling is vested in abstract systems or in personal relationships, the world of the novel’s story… — Sianne Ngai Books Copy Share Image
“Both are also examples of film noir, a postwar genre commonly understood (even to the point of cliché) as being aesthetically and… — Sianne Ngai Cinema Copy Share Image
“The anticathartic device of dilating the time in which any particular incident takes place thus accentuates the manner in which these uneventful… — Sianne Ngai Time Copy Share Image
“Heidegger claims, it seems fitting that Melville’s story about public exchanges facilitated by an anonymous agent becomes primarily preoccupied with how “confidence”… — Sianne Ngai Confidence Copy Share Image
“For just as the question of whether one’s paranoia is subjective or objective is internal to paranoia, the historically feminized and proletarianized… — Sianne Ngai Envy Copy Share Image
“If Ugly Feelings is a bestiary of affects, in other words, it is one filled with rats and possums rather than lions,… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“—rather than those of more iconic figures such as Ahab, Othello, or Lear, my focus will be on irritation instead of anger,… — Sianne Ngai Anger Copy Share Image
“More specifically, this book turns to ugly feelings to expand and transform the category of “aesthetic emotions,” or feelings unique to our… — Sianne Ngai Beauty Copy Share Image
“In other words, I mean the formal aspect of a work that has made it possible for critics of all affiliations (Marxist,… — Sianne Ngai American literature Copy Share Image
“Even an ostensibly degree-zero affect like animatedness has a version of this subjective/objective problematic at its core—namely, the question of whether “animation”… — Sianne Ngai Animation Copy Share Image
“This awkward quality might be attributed to a conspicuous avoidance of the dimension of feeling already deeply associated with “tone” and even… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“How much?,” referring to the medicine peddled by the confidence-man in his incarnation as “herb-doctor,” the analog amplifier replies, “As much as… — Sianne Ngai Confidence Copy Share Image
“a highly organized and articulate set of ideas about anything. As in the case of a love affair the fit need not… — Sianne Ngai Affair Copy Share Image
“[My original] theory of affect as amplification was flawed by [one] serious ambiguity. I had unwittingly assumed that in both electronic amplification… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“ask these questions not to dispute the tone Jameson attributes to these postmodern artifacts—the exhilaration he is speaking of is clearly of… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“The Confidence-Man is actually anaphoric in its narrative structure, insofar as its entire plot consists of a series of exchanges involving one… — Sianne Ngai Confidence Copy Share Image
“As an affective matrix devised as a “psychological explanation” for revolutionary or political impulses, which reduces social antagonisms to deficiencies of individual… — Sianne Ngai Character Copy Share Image
“While this book makes a similar if more modest claim for the social significance of its own fundamentally ambivalent “sentiments of disenchantment”… — Sianne Ngai Beauty Copy Share Image
“Indexed here by the specific feelings of paranoia and guilt, rather than an affective absence or illegibility, Harry’s political passivity, and correlative… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“On one hand, the state of being “animated” implies the most general of all affective conditions (that of being “moved” in one… — Sianne Ngai Animation Copy Share Image
“The pain receptors have evolved to make us care about injury and disease. Pain is an analog of injury in its inherent… — Sianne Ngai Pain Copy Share Image
“Whether in a direct or indirect manner, this Bartlebyan problem is one to which all of the following chapters will repeatedly return,… — Sianne Ngai Dilemmas Copy Share Image
“The Conversation to produce another highly determinate feeling—paranoia—that not coincidentally replicates the subjective/objective oscillation in its basic structure: Is the enemy out… — Sianne Ngai Communication Copy Share Image
“Indeed, while it is widely agreed that “emotions play roles in forms of action,”22 the feelings in this study tend to be… — Sianne Ngai Education Copy Share Image
“fact, at times it seems as if The Confidence-Man has been aggressively constructed for the purpose of giving the reader the unpleasant… — Sianne Ngai Books Copy Share Image
“Affect is perhaps the most difficult plane of human life to define and describe, not merely because it is a-signifying (and contemporary… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“In fact, I would suggest that what each moment produces is the inherently ambiguous affect of affective disorientation in general—what we might… — Sianne Ngai Disorientation Copy Share Image
“call “stuplimity” through a literature of exhausting repetitions and permutations, paranoia through a transcription-based poetry that continually raises the question of whether… — Sianne Ngai Books Copy Share Image
“is an account, in other words, of how a problematic valorization of powerlessness as “good” can easily emerge from the same situation… — Sianne Ngai Books Copy Share Image
“there is a sense in which ugly feelings can be described as conducive to producing ironic distance in a way that the… — Sianne Ngai Books Copy Share Image
“Similarly, Massumi argues that while emotion is “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from… — Sianne Ngai Emotion Copy Share Image
“Yet the point of the Black Rapids agent’s story is precisely that an illusory panic can easily generate a “double” that is… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“For envy makes no claim whatsoever about the moral superiority of the envier, or about the “goodness” of his or her state… — Sianne Ngai Envy Copy Share Image
“Hence while disgust is always disgust toward, in the same way that envy is envy of—whereas it makes no sense to speak… — Sianne Ngai Disgust Copy Share Image