LAST SUMMER, AS I was reading Jameson's Allegory and Ideology, I was also working my way through Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. An excellent book, and I will be getting to it in a day or two, but I thought I would devote a separate post to the notice she gives to that fascinating figure Wyndham Lewis.
Fascinating to me, anyway, but also problematic, as can be seen from the promptness with which most discussions of Lewis that are not by Lewis specialists gravitate towards the ways he can be seen as anti-semitic, or racist, or misogynistic, or fascist, or homophobic...as I said, he's problematic.
Ngai simply draws on Lewis's fascinating (but, yes, problematic) The Art of Being Ruled in talking about the relationship of avant-garde writing to her category "cute" (via Lewis's "savage indictment of cuteness" in his discussion of Gertrude Stein and the "child-cult") and in talking about Nietzsche's relationship to her category "zany."
That Ngai brought in Lewis simply to provide an interesting sidelight on her topics, not in order to show his wrong-headedness, was refreshing.
By the way, the book's indexer left out one of Ngai's more detailed discussions of Lewis, which can be found on pp. 302-04, note 61.
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