Sianne Ngai’s Lecture: Theory of the Gimmick

17 Mar 2016 - 16:00 / 17 Mar 2016 - 18:00

Location: Victoria University Chapel, Room 213, 91 Charles St. W. Toronto

This talk explores the gimmick as a capitalist aesthetic category: an objective form linked in a systematic way to a subjective judgment or affective speech act.

Sianne Ngai specializes in American literature, literary and cultural theory, and feminist studies. Her books are Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012), winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize and the PCA/ACA Ray and Pat Browne award for Best Reference or Best Primary Source Work; and Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005). Sections of both books have been translated into Swedish, Italian, German, and Slovenian. Ngai was a recipient of a 2007-08 Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and in 2014-15 was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, Germany. She served as six-week faculty at the Cornell School for Criticism and Theory in the summer of 2014. In 2015 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.