Aesthetic Theory

Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).

Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy-three great masters of the English novel-are three remarkable imagining minds. As readers of their novels, we feel ourselves to be in contact with their authorial minds and conjure the minds they create spread across the pages of their narrative worlds. In the way that we believe in and hold in mind the idea that other human beings have minds of their own do we as readers of the novel believe we are in the presence of these other minds. But how?