'Oh, miss, that's a nasty trick:' Wuthering Heights' Gimmickry

Zoom-link: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/9313771558

Abstract

This paper thinks about Emily Brontë’s unsurpassably famous (and also unsurpassably critically addressed) Wuthering Heights in relation to the American critic Sianne Ngai’s recent work on the gimmick as an aesthetic category. Gimmicks, Ngai argues in her 2020 work Theory of the Gimmick, are in some senses the perfect capitalist form when their ability to generate value surplus to the time and labour put into them is taken into account, but they also undermine concepts of value grounded in time and labour. Our experience of them veers between wonder, scepticism and annoyance. Wuthering Heights, regarded with similar ambivalence by F.R. Leavis in his famous description of the novel as ‘a kind of sport’, is a text in which gimmicks (in the form of value-producing tricks and legal manipulations) play a central role. My intention is to consider how the representation of gimmicks in the novel can be mapped onto Brontë’s narrational oddities via a discussion of Ngai’s work.

Bio

Dr Joe Kennedy teaches English and Cultural Studies on the University of Gothenburg's programme at the University of Sussex in Brighton. He is an academic and a writer whose scholarly research focuses primarily on British modernist fiction and poetry, psychoanalysis and critical theory. His work, however, is also intimately related to contemporary cultural politics in Britain with his latest book Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness published in 2018 by Repeater Books.