Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 2 of 2 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Stainless Steel Banana Slicer

David Trotter, 18 March 2021

Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form 
by Sianne Ngai.
Harvard, 401 pp., £28.95, June 2020, 978 0 674 98454 7
Show More
Show More
... a commodity’s existence as an ordinary, sensuous thing.The gimmick is an ideal topic for Sianne Ngai, a critic and theorist with a habit, as she puts it, of hanging large coats on small pegs. Her field of research is the relation between aesthetics and ideology, viewed from a post-Marxist perspective, and she has already made two strikingly ...

Giant Eye Watching

Adam Thirlwell: Pola Oloixarac, 10 February 2022

Mona 
by Pola Oloixarac, translated by Adam Morris.
Serpent’s Tail, 192 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 78816 988 2
Show More
Show More
... also to find some kind of hopefulness through it.Another term for the novel of ideas, according to Sianne Ngai, is the gimmick: ‘We might define the novel of ideas precisely by its intimate relation to the gimmick form.’ Certainly it’s difficult to let ideas flourish in a novel – in direct addresses to the reader, or in characters’ speeches ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences