The Center for the Humanities is honored to offer a small-group workshop for graduate students and faculty with visiting speaker and acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, University of Chicago). At this workshop, Ngai will lead an informal discussion on the theory of the “gimmick” and why art needs to embrace error in a world that is wrong. In Theory of the Gimmick (Harvard University Press, 2020), Ngai writes that the gimmick is “repulsive and yet strangely attractive”. It wears many hats, from a timeworn joke to a musical hook to a financial strategy or a striptease. Ngai argues that the gimmick both works too little and too hard, and she draws a connection from these hooks and jokes to political economy. In calling something a gimmick, are we registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time? And what do these misgivings say about our broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth and capitalism?
The workshop is an opportunity to dive deeper on this topic, to explore together a range of examples of the “extravagantly impoverished gimmick”. Attendees will be asked to read two advance pieces ahead of the workshop (the introduction from Theory of the Gimmick and an article by Matthew Rana in Nordic Art Review), which will be shared with you upon registration.
Seats are limited and RSVPs are required. Beverages and light snacks will be provided. To join, please send an email with your name, title, or affiliation to: rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu
At 5:45 PM on Tuesday, April 4, Ngai will also deliver a public Humanities Without Boundaries talk on “Inhabiting Error: From “Last Christmas” to “Senior’s Last Hour”. We hope you’re able to join this event as well! Here’s more information.
