Aesthetic Categories
The Program in Literature presents
The Srinivas Aravamudan Annual Lecture in Critical Theory 2023: February 23-24, 2023
Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago
Lecture
Scenes of Error
Through meditations on Hegel, Kenneth Burke's "dramatism," and the images of visual artist Ebecho Muslimova, this talk explores the affective dimensions of dialectical thinking, especially as the latter involves the risky act of staging and lingering in scenes of error.
Thursday, February 23, 2023
5:00 - 6:30pm on Zoom & in person
Register here for Zoom: https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEqcO-rqDwjHtarhdU6EHDyUFRiUO4J9YqK
Optional in-person gathering in Friedl 225 for lecture. Reception to follow.
Seminar
Aesthetic Categories
What is an aesthetic category? In what sense is it a historical phenomenon? How are its two components, spontaneous judgment and a perception of form, sutured by affect into a distinctive experience? While drawing on philosophers to think about these questions, we can also explore them by focusing on a distinctively capitalist aesthetic category: the extravagant and yet impoverished, simultaneously overperforming and underperforming, fundamentally compromised gimmick.
List of recommended readings by Sianne Ngai (in order of importance):
- Introduction, Our Aesthetic Categories
-"Theory of the Gimmick" (Article version in Critical Inquiry)
- Chapter Eight from Theory of the Gimmick
Friday, February 24, 2023
4:30 - 6:00pm on Zoom & in person
Register here for Zoom: https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpcuuqqT4sGdZGDqH31lAfPOhLeHrl6tFY
Optional in-person gathering in Friedl 225 for seminar.
Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), winner of the Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize. Her most recent book is Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), which was a Christian Gauss Book Prize finalist, winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year.
