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Our Aesthetic Categories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sianne Ngai
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Extract

The recent turn to aesthetics in literary studies has been embraced by some of its advocates as a polemical riposte to critique: a practice increasingly attacked from multiple directions but here specifically for doing artworks the disservice of reducing them to encryptions of history or ideology. But while the new or revived focus on pleasure (and, to a much lesser extent, displeasure)1 has been vaunted for the way in which it seems to circumvent the reduction of artworks to historical or ideological concepts, our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of aesthetic categories. Any literary or cultural criticism purportedly engaged with aesthetics needs to pay attention to these categories, which are by definition conceptual as well as affective and tied to historically specific forms of communication and collective life. But how does one read an aesthetic category? What kind of object is it, and what methodological difficulties and satisfactions does its analysis pose?

Type
New Archives, New Aesthetics: Talks from the Convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 4: Special Topic Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century , October 2010 , pp. 948 - 958
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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