"Ngai explores the neglected aesthetics of 'ugly feelings' that accompany situations of suspended agency, with chapters on anxiety, irritation, paranoia, envy, disgust, and a few categories of her own invention: 'stuplimity' and 'affectedness.' Her archive dazzles in range, imagination, and juxtaposition, summoning everything from classic nineteenth-century American literature to the most recent avant-garde experiments. If Ngai dramatically expands our sense of the emotions that inform modern and postmodern cultural expression, she also reflects a dominant assumption motivating the current affective turn: that emotions, even the 'ugly' ones, are enabling sources of critical knowledge."