“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 Jealousy 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
“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
“Tomkins ultimately bases his theory of affect on a principle he calls “analog amplification.” He describes affect as a mechanism that magnifies… — Sianne Ngai 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
“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
“In fact, because tone is never entirely reducible to a reader’s emotional response to a text or reducible to the text’s internal… — Sianne Ngai Books Copy Share Image
“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
“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
“For envy makes no claim whatsoever about the moral superiority of the envier, or about the “goodness” of his or her state… — Sianne Ngai Moral superiority 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
“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
“as well as over potentially ennobling or morally beatific states like sympathy, melancholia, and shame (the emotions given the most attention in… — Sianne Ngai Character 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 Jealousy Copy Share Image
“Note how the basic principles of Tomkins’ systems theory, “coassembly” and “amplification,” are taken to increasing levels of reflexive complexity here. Affect… — Sianne Ngai Single moment 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 Charlie chaplin 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 Attorney general 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
“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
“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
“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 Human life 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 Happiness Copy Share Image
“Instead, I mean the formal aspect of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as, say,… — 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
“My assumption is that affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less “sociolinguistically fixed,”… — Sianne Ngai Copy Share Image
