Ugly Feelings Research Articles

Canadian Graphic: Picturing Lives ed. by Candida Rifkin and Linda Warley

Reviewed by: Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley Rocío G. Davis (bio) Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, editors Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016, 305 pp. ISBN 978-1771121798, $29.99 paperback. The "comics boom" of the last three decades has produced important critical work that provides renewed perspectives on the multilayered ways this creative medium functions today. Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley's groundbreaking project makes a compelling case for the legacy of both mainstream and underground Canadian graphic narratives in the context of the transnational comics industry in North America. As the first volume published specifically on Canadian graphic life narratives, this timely book speaks to the myriad ways Canadian artists envision their experiences in shifting contexts, providing comics studies with broader critical perspectives. In general, the text covers substantial material on forms of life writing from established cartoonists to younger artists, to picture books and graphic life writing for young adults. The editors highlight not only a range of texts, but draw our attention to generations of print Canadian graphic artists, with essays on Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, and Seth, for the first generation—and the second generation is represented by Ho Che Anderson, Scott Chantler, Sarah Leavitt, and David Alexander Robertson. Specifically, the volume consists of essays on ten Canadian cartoonists and their work from 1980 to 2011, but also locates itself at "the cusp of a new era in alternative Canadian comics, in which diversification of many different kinds is taking place; the cartoonists' identities and subject positions are diversifying, and so are their styles, stories, and publishing platforms" (4). The book's value, thus, lies partly in how it offers a comprehensive history of the ways life, in its broadest sense, has been graphically represented in Canada, in order to signal ongoing experimentation, diversification, activism, and the need to develop renewed forms of critical examination. The collection is divided into three sections: "Confession and the Relational Self," "Collective Memory and Visual Biography," and "The Child and the Nation." The essays in the first section "consider how the intersubjectivity of comics as a form that demands active reading on the part of the reader/viewer connects to the intersubjective narrative mode of confession," particularly in the context of what Sianne Ngai calls "ugly feelings" (13). Importantly, each of the essays in this section draws from diverse rhetorical theories or autobiographical forms to elucidate the comic artists' strategies and purposes. The essays, therefore, provide intersectional critical frames that support the discussion of the graphic texts, opening up ways of understand forms of self-representation. The essays in the second section center on the ways cartoonists deploy lifewriting forms, specifically biography, in the larger context of political narratives or discourses of personal or collective memory. The third section links notions of representation of childhood with the idea of the nation within the broad context of historical representation as a pedagogical tool in texts produced for young adults. This section's privileging of graphic novels for adolescents and picture books is a welcome contribution to graphic narrative theory, as [End Page 436] it implicitly broadens the definition of what might be strictly considered "comics." In general, the contributors balance their theoretical frames with discussions of the texts, providing useful critical vocabulary and access to the analytical perspectives that have shaped comics theory in the last three decades. Kevin Ziegler's essay makes a compelling case for the mode of confession as a "common motif" in Canadian graphic life narratives. The engagement with Lauren Berlant's notion of "intimate publics" usefully structures his discussion of this mode of self-representation, and he references a wide range of texts that illustrate his argument regarding the status of confessional texts. In her persuasive and insightful essay on her mother's Alzheimer's disease—framed by questions of loss of self-narrativity and identity in the context of illness narratives such as Sarah Leavitt's graphic memoir Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me—Kathleen Venema effectively shapes the story of personal and relational disintegration. James Hall's essay on Chester Brown's I Never Liked You offers perhaps...

Appalachia as Trumpland: Honor, Precarity, and Affect in Literature from the Mountain South

Literary and cultural texts by southern poor whites in the hills of the Ozarksand Appalachia and southern migrants in Rustbelt Ohio explode with feelings such ashatred, desperation, and anger, resulting from the continual precaritization andmarginalization of the mountain communities. In (auto)biographical texts as well as inliterary fiction, the ?hillbilly? community is represented as self-segregated, proud,and independent, with special notions of honor and loyalty. Exploring the(dis)connections between the literary emotions of the people of the Mountain South andthe code of southern honor that has produced and sustained them, this article arguesthat the anxious and angry emotions that Donald Trump taps into as a political strategyare not new, but rather have been building throughout the 20th and into the 21stcenturies. The first manifestations that this precarious affective structure was formingcan be seen in this regional literature, illustrating the potential in explorations ofliterary ugly feelings (Ngai, 2005) of marginalized southerners. Thus, the articleuncovers how poor whites position their precarious existences in Trump?s USA and howthey employ various affective strategies to articulate their whiteness and theiranxiety.

Introduction - Reading Raymond Williams in Aotearoa

“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact.”[i]Williams’s famous phrase may, in the hands of his latter-day epigones in a depoliticised institutional Cultural Studies, have been turned towards justifications for the study of and accommodation to what is, but, in its originating New Left moment, this was always an assertion of what might be. Ordinary culture, and the cultures of ordinary people, were conceived, by Williams and his collaborators, as part of “a genuine revolution, transforming [people] and institutions; continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas.”[ii] Williams wrote, thought, and organised across his varied career as a socialist intellectual and activist, offering resources of hope and strategic reflections on how cultural work might contribute to the anti-capitalist project of working-class self-organisation and social transformation. That project, difficult enough in the post-war period of his own life and all the more urgent and complex in its conception in our own, the era of Trumpian reaction and ecological collapse, demanded that committed intellectuals parse the “dominant” culture—the culture of capital—for signs of the “emergent,” the collectivity to come, and traces of the “residual,” habits, products and processes from previous class societies carried over into, and deployed, in capitalist cultures.[iii] Dominant, residual and emergent were terms Williams used to map the complex and internally contradictory work of culture in class society, and to trace some of its tears, cracks and openings. The vocabulary he bequeathed us, from “structures of feeling” to “long revolution,” has a rich relevance for the rickety and crisis-prone world we find ourselves in now, after the holograms of post-modernism have ceased to be projected but before newly-coherent ruling-class images and narratives have formed. There are signs, in everything from Social Reproduction Theory to the so-called Affective Turn, of a Williams revival amongst committed intellectuals today.[iv] Materialist criticism has returned for our bad new days.
 [i] Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Conviction, ed. Norman MacKenzie (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958), 75.
 [ii] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1961), 10.
 [iii] See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–28.
 [iv] See, inter alia, Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto, 2016), an exhilaratingly revisionist socialist-feminist text studded with Williams references and asides; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), chapter two; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Jennifer Lawn, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand 1984–2008: Market Fictions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). An extended review of Lawn’s text by Shintaro Kono will appear in the next issue of this journal.

Sordid Ironies and the Short-Fingered Vulgarian: Alison Jackson’s Mental Images

Alison Jackson’s pre-election photographs of Donald Trump’s “private moments” utilize a look-alike to envision Trump in a number of compromising positions. In ways that exceed the artist’s intention, the photographs’ play of the recognition of misrecognition fosters “ugly feelings” of ressentiment that might enable resistance not only to Trump but also to reactionary Republicans and neoliberal Democrats.

The Return to Sentimentalism in Antebellum Poetry Studies

The Return to Sentimentalism in Antebellum Poetry Studies Don James McLaughlin Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment. By Wendy Dasler Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. vii + 265 pp. $40.00 paper. A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Edited by Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. v + 440 pp. $72.80 cloth. Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference. By Vivian R. Pollak. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. ix + 355 pp. $55.00 cloth. A 2017 headline reads: “Merriam-Webster tweets definition of ‘snowflake,’ which is somehow a political act” (PenzeyMoog). To scholars of the written word, the premise that dictionary definitions can be political will not seem outrageous. But the tweet did carry more than a little dramatic irony. It explained that the use of snowflake as an epithet, generally hurled by conservatives at left-wing activists championing diversity, has a deeper history. “In Missouri in the early 1860s,” Merriam-Webster wrote in a complementary article, “a ‘snowflake’ was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people” (Merriam-Webster). As Jessica Goldstein has shown, lay definitions on UrbanDictionary.com quickly made note of the revelation. [End Page 92] Above older definitions disparaging social justice advocates, a new, 2017 definition by a user named Lascaux Othello appeared: “Snowflake. Referring to someone, usually the Alt-Right, . . . whose immense white fragility causes a meltdown when confronted with the most minute deviation from orthodox White Supremacy. They often cry bloody murder when expected to give the most modest expression of basic human decency” (Othello). With a nod to the work of Robin DiAngelo, the definition makes snowflake the sign of “white fragility”: “a state” of “insulation” from “race-based stress,” characteristic of white communities in North America, “in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” (DiAngelo 54). Characterized throughout the 2016 election and in its aftermath as an emblem of liberalism’s addiction to empathy and individuality, the snowflake has, in an amusing turn, been historicized as a rather on-the-nose symbol for the trolls most likely to use it. Yet the more immediate irony of the epithet, as a strategy for demeaning the left, should not be lost on us. No one has bemoaned the resilient sentimentalism of liberalism more than leftist scholars themselves. From Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) to Susan Stryker’s 1994 manifesto on “transgender rage,” the Gay Shame movement’s resistance to the commercialization of LGBT Pride as exemplified by Halperin and Traub, and Wendy Brown’s critique of tolerance discourse in Regulating Aversion (2006), the imperative to sympathize has been a subject of critique for a long time. Citing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-seller as a prime example, Berlant observes in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality (2008) that, while sentimental literature might elicit “fantasies” of political solidarity in readers, “the forces of distortion in the world of feeling politics that the citation of Uncle Tom puts into play are as likely to justify ongoing forms of domination as they are to give form and language to impulses toward resistance” (40–41). Such literature sets a low bar, in other words, by which fantasies of justice tend to become an end in and of themselves. And yet, against this familiar critique, a movement in scholarship un-allergic to the moniker of the sentimentalist has also been experiencing a resurgence as of late. Here, in a form of what Michel Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” a certain snowflakery is being recuperated (101).1 The new scholarship invested in reclaiming sentiment continues to derive momentum from literature of the eighteenth century and antebellum period—eras in which sentimentalism served as a crucible for public opinion and revolutions in governmentality. Ramesh Mallipeddi’s Spectacular Suffering thus encourages scholars “to loosen the grip of ideological critique” in order “to engage more fully with sentimental mediations of slave suffering” (23). To dismiss sentimental appeals for political recognition [End...

The Provocative Fifteenth Century

This double issue of Exemplaria suggests that fifteenth-century literary culture in England promoted a sensibility of provocation, where not only authors but also scribes, translators, readers, recipe-makers, bookmakers, and others engaged in literary-textual-material practices that might be understood as agitative in a speculative or inquisitive way. Of particular importance to this development was the work of John Lydgate, whose poetry agitated his contemporary readers as much as it has his modern critics. In consideration of aesthetic theories by scholars Sianne Ngai, Fred Moten, and Simon Jarvis, this introduction asks that we rethink the ramifications of our responses to Lydgate’s work, and especially the “ugly feelings” that have historically characterized Lydgatean reception. Revisiting written responses to Lydgate’s work from his lifetime and shortly after his death, I explore evidence that the poet deliberately cultivated mixed responses to his work, and that its capacity to perplex, irritate, and rebuff its readers was part of a larger aesthetic strategy more often seen in much later avant-garde writers and artists.

Joy of Ugly Feelings: Korean “Bad Taste” Webtoons as a Case Study

Joy of Ugly Feelings: Korean “Bad Taste” Webtoons as a Case Study

Canonical Predicaments

Canonical Predicaments Ed White and Duncan Faherty Susanna Rowson always loomed large as we planned and organized what has become the Just Teach One (jto) project. No other figure seems to signal, simultaneously, the tremendous power of canon transformation and the stalling of that exciting project. It is at once almost impossible to imagine the early American literary canon before the recovery of Charlotte Temple and remarkable to think that an author so widely taught in our time remains so little known, the vast majority of her works out of print. Our very first text, the novella Amelia: or the Faithless Briton (first serialized in the Columbian Magazine in 1787), was proposed in part as an attempt to disrupt narrowing readings of Rowson's best-seller, which had come to do double duty as paradigmatic sentimental novel and seduction tale. The preparation of a classroom-ready edition of another Rowson novel, then, was an undertaking of special significance, and one we pursued only after several semesters of trial and error. While there were several candidates for a teachable Rowson text—we talked about The Inquisitor, Trials of the Human Heart, and Mary, or the Test of Honour, among others—we ultimately settled on Sincerity for several reasons, above all its more moderate length and its serial periodical publication. The participation of thirteen teachers around the country, five of whom we asked to write more sustained reflections for this forum, reminded us yet again of the importance of a scholarly community for recovery work and of the diversity of responses.1 We had each taught the novel several times, and in our conversations about those classroom experiences the frequent touchstone was Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings. Ngai's interest in expanding the breadth and depth of aesthetic and political analysis is multifaceted, but among other things she notes how "[s]omething about the cultural canon itself seems to prefer higher passions and emotions" (11) over the "sites of emotional negativity" (1) that almost "disable" other works "from acquiring canonical distinction" (11). What this has meant is not simply a skewed canon but also an analytical blindness about the "unusually knotted or condensed 'interpretations of predicaments'" associated [End Page 194] with other emotional modes (3). Ngai's discussion, it should be noted, includes among the "higher passions and emotions" of the literary canon the well-studied sympathy of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel—Stowe is a frequent reference—to suggest that the alternative canon that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has suffered some of the same distortions. Ngai's formulation seemed a fruitful way to think about a work like Sincerity, which, while written within a powerful tradition of sentimental fiction, moves the sentimental mode in new directions. Expressive sympathy is there, to be sure, but it seems to shift from the central episodes of the plot to the framing of the narrative, above all with Anne's sympathy toward Sarah, as expressed to Elinor. This relocation of sympathy from the primary characters to the readers not only ironizes the dynamic so evident in, say, Charlotte Temple but also creates a new set of problems, including how readers might relate to or even comprehend the emotional palette expressed by Sarah: self-destructive indifference, humiliation, paralysis, resentment, envy, equivocation, and so on. Ngai's primary interest in ugly feelings is perhaps their involvement with "suspended agency" (1), which is an apt description of the helplessness evoked by the reading of Sincerity and another reminder that late-eighteenth-century sentimentality cannot be reduced to a simpler precursor for a more aesthetically fine-tuned nineteenth-century achievement. To put it another way, Sincerity demonstrates Rowson's ongoing experimentation across and, in this instance, late in her career with the sentimental mode and its oddities. To use another of Ngai's formulations, its "gaps and illegibilities" might signal "interpretations of predicaments" literary scholars have yet to explore (1). What this meant for jto was that Sincerity offered opportunities for illuminating critical discussions within and outside the classroom while also posing significant challenges, above all regarding a sense of the novel's lack of aesthetic focus. These observations might suggest that our interest in Sincerity was...

About This Issue

It is with great pleasure that we present this special issue, “Looking Forward, Looking Back on the Legend of Good Women.” Guest editors Betsy McCormick, Leah Schwebel, and Lynn Shutters reject the idea that the Legend is an unsuccessful experiment. Instead, they assume that close examination of the text will display Chaucer's accomplishment, to which end they have assembled a superb group of scholars who read the Legend as a central work in Chaucer's exploration of women's emotional lives.The subjects of this issue reflect the broad scope of twenty-first-century Chaucer study: they include prosody, classical and medieval source study, reception history, affect and emotion, and women's lived experience of love, marriage, and betrayal. Where much study of the Legend has focused on the variant F and G Prologues, the essays here direct attention to the individual women in individual legends. Carolyn Collette examines the details of the Legend's poetic line, finding similarities and contrast with Chaucer's work in other poems. Leah Schwebel considers how Chaucer's presentation of the morality of Lucretia's suicide challenges the accounts by Livy and Augustine. Andrew Cole shows Chaucer interacting with both Ovid and Gower, and the Chaucer-Gower influences running in both directions. Glenn Burger juxtaposes the Legend's accounts with those in late-fourteenth-century conduct books, highlighting the Legend's “ugly feelings.” Lynn Shutters explores the Legend's individualized formulations of the contentious performance of marital love. Irina Dumitrescu examines how Chaucer's men use “beautiful” language to deceive women, who suffer when they are responsive. Megan Cook relates modern critical response, and especially the focus on the F and G Prologues, to the presentation of the Legend in manuscripts and early printed books. Nancy Bradley Warren shows how John Bossewell's effort to promote an ideal of English masculinity in his late-sixteenth-century Workes of Armorie is undercut by the examples he draws from the Legend.The issue closes with Carolyn Dinshaw's reflections on how she treated the Legend in her classic feminist study Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Juxtaposing Chaucer and the musician Prince, Dinshaw considers how far feminist study, gender study, and Legend study have progressed in the past three decades.We are confident that these essays will stimulate new conversations on Chaucer's method, language, and, most especially, achievement in the Legend of Good Women.

“Pite renneth soone in gentil herte”: Ugly Feelings and Gendered Conduct in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women

Abstract This article reads the Legend of Good Women alongside two late-fourteenth-century conduct texts for women, the Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and the Ménagier de Paris. It argues that the dysphoric emotional states felt by the Legend's women not only make erotic love illegible as an ennobling emotional experience, but also embody disturbing states of obstructed agency that threaten to undo established affective relations between the aesthetics of love and the social. In contrast, contemporary conduct texts for women construct emotion in ideologically satisfying ways by writing women good in their roles as wives and household managers, thereby providing a clearly legible alternative to fin' amor and its definitions of noble subjectivity.

Women's leadership in the Asian Century: does expansion mean inclusion?

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A central finding was that gender is not a category of analysis in higher education policy, research or statistical data in the region. Our interview data suggest that leadership was frequently not an object of desire for women. Being associated with particular types of masculinities, leadership often carried a heavy affective load for those women who transgressed patriarchal socio-cultural norms and disrupted the symbolic order of women being led by men. Leadership was frequently perceived and experienced by women in terms of navigating a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities.

“Heavy jokes”: Festive unpleasure in the interwar novel

Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social, and cultural relation of literature and play. In accounts from Bakhtin onwards, carnival excess fosters renewal of the social realm. Yet the “festive vision” of restoration and rebirth offered by a Bakhtinian critique fails to account for the divergent nature of party literature in the period after World War I. During the interwar period, satirical novels from both sides of the Atlantic represented the decay of modern sociability. When play is transformed into work, a carnival vision becomes untenable; the party is no longer a source of social, emotional, or sacral renewal, but instead the site of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as ugly feelings. In representative novels by Anthony Powell and Carl Van Vechten, disgust and boredom, rather than pleasure and interest, dominate the festive landscape.

Shame and the City – ‘Looting’, Emotions and Social Structure

The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological-situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame-rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not have a theory of violence in itself but treats the connections between shame-rage and violence as largely self-evident. While emotions such as shame have agental properties, as Scheff and others argue, these need to be situated within structural and cultural conditions that are likely to evoke shame. Moreover, to develop Scheff's approach further, violence needs to be understood as being communicative and invoking normative justifications, which mediate the effects of shame-rage. This analysis is developed with reference to recent instances of collective disorder, especially the English riots in August 2011, which is based on published research and media accounts from participants. The acquisition of consumer goods through ‘looting’ was public performance in spaces where a ‘moral holiday’ permitted a brief revaluation of the social order. Through this example the article shows how an underlying configuration of inequality, exclusion and shame coalesced into events in which the violence was a form of performative communication. This articulated ‘ugly feelings’ that invoked normative justification for participation, at least at the time of the disturbances. The discussion provides an integrated account of structural-emotional conditions for violence combined with the dynamics of situated actions within particular spaces. It aims to do two things –to provide a framework for analysing the structural and affective bases for violence and to offer a nuanced understanding of ‘violence’ with reference to public disorder.

‘Hermenauts Ashore’: The Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 6–13 July 2014

‘Hermenauts Ashore’:The Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 6–13 July 2014 Gerard O’Donoghue (bio) Sailing briskly outwards through the Library rotunda, I torque to salute the salute of Tim Conley striding briskly inwards. Check out and check in. No time now. Dash down steps, through gate, and up Kildare Street at a clip. Coasting the tight corner through the narrow pavement’s thick crowd onto Stephen’s Green I spy from the foot of the Shelbourne Hotel’s steps the white shock of Fritz Senn at the head of the steps of Boston College. The Swiss disease of punctuality. Watching for latecomers. Of which I am guilty. Two to two. Dash and you’ll make it. The Dublin James Joyce Summer School offers an incomparable asset in Dublin itself. Trieste, Zurich, and Paris have their claims on the writer and his work but while these sites of pilgrimage venerate a biography, to walk in Dublin is to pace out the spatial scales of Joyce’s narrative universe. That dash up Kildare Street and across the northeast corner of the green to Boston College took me apologetically past Fritz Senn and into Luca Crispi’s afternoon seminar on ‘Two Gallants’ where I could vividly see Lenehan and Corley sloping around the corner I had just slungshot in my haste to arrive (more or less) on time. One hundred and ten years after June 1904, despite the changes of many street names and the rise or fall of certain monuments, the topography of the city is essentially unchanged. One can still walk through the south city markets on Georges Street where Bloom allegedly bought Neave’s baby food (U 12.1651–2) or the corporation markets on Mary’s Lane where ‘O’Connell Fitzsimon takes toll’ (U 12.90). That young piano tuner could [End Page 171] happily tap his way, with the courteous assistance of good citizens, from Ormond Quay to South Frederick Street without redrawing his mental map. But no one map, nor one spooling thread, can guide a reader through Joyce’s work. As Senn, the summer school’s patron, reminded us at the outset of the week, the reading of Joyce is a non-terminating and polyphonous process. The summer school, hosted by Director Anne Fogarty and Associate Director Luca Crispi, brought together seasoned pilots and navigators who, like decent citizens, guided me in my blindness over many fraught crossings. The first paper of the week was delivered by Anne Fogarty (UCD) who drew on the work of Teresa Brennan and Sianne Ngai to trace Joyce’s affective mapping of Dublin in Dubliners with its lingering and offensive odours of decay. Conceptualizing affect as both phenomenal and social, both endocrinological and cognitive, Fogarty took us through a series of moments in Dubliners where narrating (and reading) minds sense the affective cues that establish atmosphere. Fogarty argued that Joyce’s characters are, pace Matthew Arnold’s conception of Celtic emotionalism, in possession of a ‘bodily intelligence’ that receives and transmits atmospheres. If those atmospheres often reduce the narrative to elliptical silence, the activation of those ‘ugly feelings’ or collective pressure points are also moments of potential discernment. The moment of paralyzed action, Fogarty argued, is also a window for apprehension, cognition, and judgement. John Brannigan’s (UCD) paper also engaged in a type of re-mapping, asking us to shift focus from the spatial scales of nation, city, and domestic spaces, and to exchange those terrestrial territories for the sea, the archipelago, and the vessel. I should here acknowledge that the title of this report has been pirated from Tim Conley’s coinage — ‘hermenautics’ — struck in response to Brannigan’s paper. Brannigan deployed his profound historical knowledge of the status and uses of the Irish Sea as an ‘inland waterway’ in Joyce’s youth. By recovering a sense of the sea as the connective tissue between the territories of the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland rather than a barrier that authorized Ireland’s insular integrity, Brannigan offered us a reading of Joyce’s shifting orientations towards the sea from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, and made the case that in going to sea, rather than...

Ugly Feelings (review)

SIANNE NGAI Ugly Feelings Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. x + 422 pp. M elville stands—not unlike the democratic god in “Knights and Squires”—at both the center and circumference of Sianne Ngai’s stunning and original study of the negative affects she terms “ugly feelings,” providing the book’s point of departure, the focus of its afterword, as well as a significant portion of the eclectic archive in between. Neither a book about Melville nor a series of readings in Melville, Ugly Feelings is in many ways a sustained reading-through Melville, a book that has less to do with Melville’s body of writing, as such, than with what that writing does and—more to the point—with what one can do with it. From its opening pages, Ugly Feelings unfolds “in Melvillean fashion,” in Ngai’s phrase, seeking out “affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity,” which she first roots in the affective and political “equivocality” of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Ngai 1). Naming both a “Bartlebyan affect” and a “Bartlebyan aesthetic,” Ngai then tracks what becomes a kind of Bartleby-effect through a wide-ranging archive of modern and postmodern fiction, poetry, film, television , and philosophy, all of which shares a fundamental preoccupation with the “suspended agency” and “emotional negativity” of the small subject: a figure epitomized in both Bartleby himself and in the Sub-Sub Librarian of Moby-Dick’s “Extracts.” In taking up the cause of “the administered world’s many Sub-Subs” (10), Ngai passes over the “rage-driven” Moby-Dick for what she describes as Melville’s more emotionally ambiguous works—Pierre, The Confidence-Man, “Bartleby”—to identify in them the thematic fixations and formal features that unite the affective and aesthetic registers of Melville’s work, while also developing out of these texts something more. Writing “in Melvillean fashion,” Ngai ultimately finds in Melville, not only her study’s chief aesthetic model, but also one of its principle theorists of affective ambiguity and—crucially—the unexpected political efficacy to be found in constructions of feelings that appear improper, fake, or simply ugly. Envy, irritation, anxiety, paranoia, and disgust, along with two feelings she names herself—“animatedness” and “stuplimity”—make up what Ngai calls her “bestiary” of weak and petty affects (Ngai 7). Distinguished by their nastiness as well as their seeming impotence, she argues, these feelings c 2012 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 70 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S R E V I E W nonetheless mediate in a significant way between the aesthetic and the political , providing something like an allegory for the shared passivity of the modern “administered” subject and of art in general in its “increasingly resigned and pessimistic relationship to political action” (3). Ngai bypasses better-known aesthetic emotions (sublimity, catharsis, sympathy) in pursuit of feelings which would seem far less productive, but which remain for her fundamentally social and material, bearing with them “a certain kind of historical truth” (5) as well as a particular political significance, however ambiguous and equivocal. For example, in Ngai’s analysis, envy is a feeling structured by fundamental inequalities that ought to disclose real historical conditions, but more often than not, envy ends up discrediting its subject politically— particularly when that subject is female—by turning back on the envious charges of pettiness and lack (35). Irritation, by contrast, initially appears as a feeling of weak intentionality and basic impropriety (irritation is always either more or less feeling about a situation than it demands), but linked in Ngai’s nuanced analysis to the physical experience of racialization that Frantz Fanon terms “epidermalization” (184), irritation emerges as a politically charged and strategically resistant affect in minority discourse (208). Ngai draws deeply on the work of theorists of aesthetics and politics— principally Fredric Jameson, along with Theodore Adorno and Raymond Williams—taking seriously their claims that both affective and aesthetic forms carry with them political and historical content. But even as she relies heavily on Jameson...

Listen to Your Body: Ugly Feelings and the Post-Political Japanese American Subject of Susan Choi's American Woman

About halfway through Susan Choi's novel American Woman (2003), the Japanese American protagonist, Jenny Shimada, undergoes a somewhat puzzling physiological experience that can be described as one...

Struggles for value: value practices, injustice, judgment, affect and the idea of class

This paper is about the struggle for value by those who live intensified devaluation in the new conditions of legitimation and self-formation, by which the self is required to repeatedly reveal its value through its accrual and investment in economic, symbolic, social and cultural capitals. It explores how this value struggle is experienced: felt affectively, known and spoken through discourses of injustice. Drawing on a small research project, which uses the British New Labour government's Respect Agenda as an evocative device to provoke discussion, the paper details how those positioned as already marginal to the dominant symbolic, presented as 'useless' subjects rather than 'subjects of value' of the nation, generate alternative ways for making value. It examines how the experience of injustice generates affective responses expressed as 'ugly-feelings'. The conversion of these 'ugly feelings' into articulations of 'just-talk' reveals how different understandings of value, of what matters and what counts, come into effect and circulate alongside the dominant symbolic. The issue that most angered working-class respondents is how they are positioned, judged, blamed and held responsible for an inheritance over which they have no control, 'an accident of birth'. They were acutely aware of how they were constantly judged and de-legitimated and how practices such as selfishness and greed were legitimate for others. Showing how they refuse to authorize those they consider lacking in value but with authority and in a position to judge, the paper demonstrates how class relations are lived through a struggle, not only against economic limitation but a struggle against unjustifiable judgment and authority and for dignified relationality. The paper reveals a struggle at the very core of ontology, demonstrating how the denigrated defend and make their lives liveable; an issue at the heart of current austerity politics which may have increased significance for the future.

What Can Reading Do?

In this response piece, I consider the variety of ways in which reading may be said to work upon a reader, and I bring out the importance of the idea of affect in this respect. I note that affect is frequently conceived of in a positive light, and my argument shifts to ask what happens if the reader is bored, puzzled, disgusted, irritated, or otherwise disengaged. Using Patricia Meyer Spacks's Boredom and Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings as critical works to support my case, I suggest that we should pay more attention to the ways in which reading may confuse or alienate us, and I maintain that these negative affects are ones of particular importance when we consider the global reach of the novel. How might we understand and negotiate what I term “unsatisfactory reading,” especially if it is provoked through the unfamiliarity of literary or social convention?

“A Terribly Incomplete Thing”: <i>No-No Boy</i> and the Ugly Feelings of Noir

In its January 1956 issue, Reader's Digest published an article by Albert Q. Maisel titled Japanese Among Us, which offered an assessment of status of Japanese Americans in postwar years. The piece contended that while Japanese Americans had been subject to decades of discrimination that culminated in their wartime internment in West Coast detention camps, sacrifices, composure, and success of Japanese American soldiers, students, and entrepreneurs in 1940s and 1950s led to an amazing turnabout in their fortunes. Maisel argued that mid-1950s Japanese Americans were enjoying a prestige, a prosperity and a freedom from prejudice that even most sanguine of had never hoped to attain within their own lifetime (182). The improved status of Japanese Americans, article contends, can be traced to performance of Nisei soldiers in highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which had been assembled interned young men were asked to serve in military forces of same country that had incarcerated and their families. By middle of 1944, Maisel states, the conduct of evacuated Japanese and, above all, superb military record of Nisei had brought about a reversal in feelings of most other Americans toward them (192). The patriotic valor and dedication displayed by Nisei soldiers had galvanized public opinion, Maisel claims, and ensuing years saw gradual erosion of prejudice, as Japanese Americans returned to life outside camps and achieved remarkable economic and cultural success. As evidence of such success, Maisel points to achievements of a long list of individual Japanese Americans in agriculture, law, education, and business. Like many other articles about Japanese Americans in mass-market publications during postwar years, Maisel's essay claimed that anti-Asian prejudice was largely confined to past and that through their industry, patience, and patriotic commitment, Japanese Americans were rapidly entering American mainstream. (1) In painting such a picture, essay foreshadows model minority discourse that would come to shape public image of Japanese Americans in 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. (2) Given his aim of demonstrating both wartime loyalty of Japanese Americans and ultimately all-embracing and tolerant nature of American democracy (even as article's title enforces a divide between Japanese Americans and us), Maisel neglects to mention history of those interned Nisei who refused to serve in army, earning moniker because they responded negatively to two key questions on a government questionnaire administered to Japanese American men in camps. The postwar predicament of such no-no boys serves as focal point of John Okada's novel No-No Boy, published a year after Japanese Among Us appeared. The novel, which has become a canonical work of Asian American literature, complicates relentlessly upbeat thrust of Maisel's account by foregrounding emotional anguish of a no-no boy who returns from prison to find Japanese American community deeply fractured along lines of generation and military participation. However, extent to which No-No Boy challenges liberal, assimilationist ideology at heart of an essay such as Japanese Among Us has been vigorously debated. Critics such as Jinqi Ling have sought to discern novel's response to narrowly-conceived politics of national identity that dominated postwar years, when Cold War ideological drives toward U.S. nationalism and legitimation of material abundance promoted tendencies to embrace a common national character and a 'seamless' American culture (360). While Ling argues that novel rejects both wholesale assimilation and a diametrically opposed Japanese nationalism (374), Suzanne Arakawa more recently contends that Okada's text ultimately demonstrates virtual impossibility of resisting grand narrative of assimilation (191). …

Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words; Ugly Feelings; A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry; Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation

Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words; Ugly Feelings; A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry; Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation