“The asymmetry of power that cuteness revolves around is another compelling reminder of how aesthetic categories register social conflict. There can be no experience of any person or object as cute that does not somehow call up the subject’s sense… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“in my afterword, which discusses the ugliest of all ugly feelings: disgust. As” — 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, envy rather… — Sianne Ngai 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 ideologically driven… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“In other words, a positional parallelism in which sound is foregrounded as an independent feature (Nathanson, WP, 140), comes to override an ideational parallelism at the exact moment the subjective proprietorship of a feeling, ostensibly secured by analogical equivalences between affect, money, and language, is rendered questionable and unstable simply by the amplification of these equivalences.” — Sianne Ngai Copy Share
“Indeed, while it is widely agreed that “emotions play roles in forms of action,”22 the feelings in this study tend to be diagnostic rather… — 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 way or another), but also a feeling that implies being “moved” by a particular feeling, as when one is said to be animated by happiness or anger. Animatedness thus seems to have both an unintentional and intentional form.… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share
“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 along.” — 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 think of… — Sianne Ngai 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 character or “private dissatisfactions,” Jameson notes, “the theory of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment.”41 Even if envy is not exactly the same feeling, then, as this moralizing pathos… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share
“these audible demonstrations that whether the feeling is vested in abstract systems or in personal relationships, the world of the novel’s story runs on… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
“Indeed, as a system of exchange based on a highly codified feeling that is continually reproduced and circulated even as it cannot be subjectively felt, Melville’s novel harnesses the logic of this market for an inquiry into the role of virtual emotion in literature in particular.55 It seems fitting, then, that Melville’s most anti-psychological novel, one explicitly preoccupied with the… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share
“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 there or… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
