My own personal moments of stuplimity have come from some of the readings so far, which are are awash in a thick river of words that astonishes and overwhelms me. Now that I'm much more cognizant of how much work goes into crafting a lengthy paper or article on this scholarly level, each reading we have tackled this semester seems a room of pennies mired in honey. They are very obviously each a material result of a period of hard work, but the ideas contained within them have sometimes proven hard to excavate. A sticky situation, if you will.
Ngai's article itself is a vision of stuplimity, to me. I feel like it's a very subjective term, perhaps similar to the sublime. Perhaps seeing a Shakespeare play could be a stuplimitous (?) experience for some. The text is dense, heavy, and bewildering sometimes, but wading through the text can be extraordinarily fruitful. Reading Peggy Phelan's book "Mourning Sex" was a truly stuplimitous experience for me. It was the first time I had tried to understand something so complex that it bordered on stuplimitous. Perhaps I reveal too much of my own intellectual limitations, but to me, readings like Ngai and Phelan seem insurmountable at times, especially if there is no opportunity to have a conversation about the works after reading them.
A work we've dissected in class that seems akin to a stuplimitous work is Handke's "Offending the Audience." At times, the words seemed totally divorced from meaning, coming in waves, inspiring both irritation and boredom in me. From what I can understand about Ngai's theory, stuplimity is that mysterious combination of overwhelming awe and mind-numbing boredom. She exhorts us to interrogate that feeling and welcome it as we would welcome a moment of the sublime. Not an easy task.
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