Sianne Ngai

In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai constructs a theoretical framework for analyzing and mobilizing affective concepts and presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a range of cultural artifacts produced in what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer refer to in their text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the ‘fully administered world of late modernity' [3] Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended.

In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

The nonaesthetic properties associated with cuteness - smallness, compactness, formal simplicity, softness or pliancy thus also index minor negative affects such as helplessness, pitifulness and even despondency.

These include fictions by Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and Henry James; twentieth-century poetic stunts; the video installations of contemporary artist Stan Douglas; reality television; and the novel of ideas.

[9] Her book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting was the winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize and the PCA/ACA Ray and Pat Browne award.