Our aesthetic categories : zany, cute, interesting / Sianne Ngai.

First Harvard University Press paperback edition.

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2015.

©2012

333 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association; James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as the discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

English

October 03, 2017

Includes bibliographical references and index.