id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
expositions-2767	Schlauraff, Kristie	Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 416 pages. $35.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978–0–674–98454–7.	2023	6	.pdf	application/pdf	2323	82	46	Ngai’s sweeping account of gimmicks in literature, horror films, photography, digital installation art, and advertising, among other things, captures the pervasiveness of an aesthetic category that raises significant questions about how capitalism structures our social interactions and how much longer we can (or should) sustain an economic system that renders certain lives disposable. What this example ultimately does is force readers to confront their own complicity in a system the excludes certain individuals from social protection; those who lack social and political power are more vulnerable to gimmicks, not because their aesthetic judgments are less refined or nuanced, but because they often have to subscribe to or utilize gimmicks as a means of survival, as Ngai points out not only in this chapter but also in her introduction.	cache/expositions-2767.pdf	txt/expositions-2767.txt