Criteria

by Sianne Ngai

Poetry. Sianne Ngai's writings use, among others, devices of analogy and repetition to investigate philosophical questions about language. The pressure she puts on her conventional use of devices yield a third, and somewhat more enigmatic, trick of language, which I would call migration. Like birds of formal gestures, Ngai's poetry and prose patterns, through distancing, question about valued categories of knowledge. Relationships of science, language, and the body are part and parcel to the patterned movements of her texts, which please this reader above all because of their lucid sensibility, skepticism, and wit-- Carla Harryman.

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies.