Literary Gimmicks: Sianne Ngai

The English Department of SFU and SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement co-presented a lecture by Sianne Ngai (Stanford University).

Ngai's work has consistently and brilliantly rejigged and invigorated the trajectory of affect, aesthetics, and cultural production. Methodologically, her work cuts new ground for literary and cultural studies through its insistence on the value and counter-value of the minor, the contradictory, and the ambivalent. As she puts it, "I'm interested in states of weakness: in 'minor' or non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency; in trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings. More specifically, I'm interested in the surprising power these weak affects and aesthetic categories seem to have, in why they've become so paradoxically central to late capitalist culture" (Cabinet Magazine).

This lecture, "Literary Gimmicks", was derived from Ngai's new project called Theory of the Gimmick, on literary gimmicks and the intersection of technique and enchantment in the literature of twentieth-century capitalism.