SUSAN .SONTAG ESSAYS of the 1960S & 70S

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

SUB Hamburg A 2014/7453 SUSAN .SONTAG ESSAYS OF THE 1960s & 70s Against Interpretation Styles of Radical Will On Photography ' Illness as Metaphor Uncollected Essays David Rieff, editor Contents AGAINST INTERPRETATION AND OTHER ESSAYS (1966) I Against Interpretation, 10 On Style, 21 II The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer, 44 Simone Weil, 53 Camus' Notebooks, 56 Michel Leiris' Manhood, 64 The Anthropologist as Hero, 71 The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukacs, 83 Sartre's Saint Genet, 93 Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel, 99 in Ionesco, 112 Reflections on The Deputy, 120 The Death of Tragedy, 127 Going to Theater, etc., 135 Marat/Sade/Artaud, 157 - iv Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson, 170 Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, 187 The Imagination of Disaster, 199 Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, 215 Resnais' Muriel, 220 A Note on Novels and Films, 229 v Piety Without Content, 234 Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, 241 Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition, 248 Notes on "Camp," 259 One Culture and the New Sensibility, 275 STYLES OF RADICAL WILL (1969) I The Aesthetics of Silence, 292 The Pornographic Imagination, 320 "Thinking Against Oneself ": Reflections on Cioran, 353 II Theatre and Film, 374 Bergman's Persona, 394 Godard, 414 Vlll CONTENTS ill What's Happening in America (1966), 452 Trip to Hanoi, 462 ON PHOTOGRAPHY (1977) In Plato's Cave, 529 America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly, 546 Melancholy Objects, 563 The Heroism of Vision, 587 Photographic Evangels, 608 The Image-World, 635 A Brief Anthology of Quotations, 656 ILLNESS AS METAPHOR (1978), 675 UNCOLLECTED ESSAY'S William Burroughs and the Novel, 733 The Double Standard of Aging, 745 The Third World of Women, 769 Francis Bacon: "About Being in Pain," 800 A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?, 803 Beauty: How Will It Change Next?, 806 • Chronology, 815 Note on the Texts, 825 Notes, 831 Index, 853 .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

Three Elegies for Susan Sontag
Three Elegies for Susan Sontag 1. Art WHEN I WAS FINDING my voice as a writer in the thick of the sixties, Susan Sontag loomed large: she was among the relatively few literary intellectuals who were seriously trying to grapple with a new, rich, and, for many, disconcerting cultural situation. The title essay of her first collection, Against Interpretation, combined a formidable erudition about the avant-garde with a manifesto-like plea that critics end their one- sided emphasis on teasing out the meaning of art and embrace their pleasure in it. "What is important now," she wrote, "is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." The arch- interpreters of the modernist canon, Marx and Freud, had in Sontag's view outlived their usefulness. Film, she declared, was "the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now" because its vivid immediacy discouraged interpretation. The reason, in part, was "the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were supposed to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds." Another essay in the same volume, "One Culture and the New Sensibility," argued that the distinction between high and low culture was breaking down and that the hallmark of the "new sensibility" was its orientation toward non-literary forms. "Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility": this was the stuff of contemporary art.
[Show full text]
American Characters Reflected in Susan Sontag's Literary Writings
American International Journal of Social Science Vol. 2 No. 7; October 2013 American Characters Reflected in Susan Sontag’s Literary Writings Song Shenli (宋沈黎) College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University 1 Foreign Language College Zhejiang Gongshang University Xia Sha City-University-Town, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310018 China Abstract The influential yet controversial American writer and critic Susan Sontag, is reputable for her sharp insight and profound learning, Sontag’s writings cover a wide range of fields, including social criticism, literary creation, cultural studies, and political critiques. To further understand Sontag’s contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, this thesis is aimed at exploring the formation of her thematic consideration and the employment of artistic techniques so as to reveal the core values of Sontag’s creative writings. Key Words: American Characters; National identity; Utopia But there’s everything in Shakespeare. Exactly. As in America. America is meant to mean everything. — Susan Sontag, In America At the end of the twentieth century, Susan Sontag stands as a highly visible international figure for her established fame in the literary circle and the domain of social criticism. As an essayist, short story writer, novelist and a leading commentator on modern culture, Susan Sontag has produced many essays covering such diverse topics as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography, AIDS, and revolution in the third world countries. Within the American literary circle, she was called “a literary pinup,” and “the dark lady of American Letters,” while she remains as one of 50 Great Living Americans in Marquis’s Who’s Who (1995). Ranking number 61 on Life’s list of “Women Who Shook the World,” (1995) Sontag has been named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in Paris (1995) and has won a Macarthur “genius” award (1990) and the Montblanc de la Culture award (1994) for her humanitarian work in Sarajevo.
[Show full text]
A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas David Kurnick
A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas David Kurnick ELH, Volume 87, Number 2, Summer 2020, pp. 349-374 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2020.0011 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757342 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] A FEW LIES: QUEER THEORY AND OUR METHOD MELODRAMAS BY DAVID KURNICK “We have been telling a few lies”: the words mark the end of what we could call the overture of Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”1 The lies Bersani is referring to are, in the ﬁrst place, the dignifying fantasies gay male activists have spun about the necessarily liberatory consequences of same-sex attraction. Right-wing politics, he has just reminded us, consort quite nicely with some men’s “marked sexual preference for sailors and telephone linemen.”2 He is about to tear off into what for some of us, more than thirty years later, remains a famous rebuttal of Dennis Altman’s claims for the gay bathhouse as a space of Whitmanian democracy. Bersani begs to differ: “Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours[.]”3 Such deﬂationary rhetoric is, of course, one of Bersani’s hallmarks. But he’s not alone in it. In fact, uncomfortable truth-telling constitutes a central tradition in what we have for a while been calling queer culture.
[Show full text]
Against Interpretation: and Other Essays Free
FREE AGAINST INTERPRETATION: AND OTHER ESSAYS PDF Susan Sontag | 336 pages | 25 Aug 2001 | St Martin's Press | 9780312280864 | English | New York, United States Against Interpretation - Wikipedia However, your assignment doesn't have to be a hair-pulling, frazzled all-nighter. In the middle, you'll find the meat. Your introduction is like the top bun announcing the subject, your supporting paragraphs are the beef in the middle, and your conclusion is the bottom bun, supporting everything. Who, after all, would eat a burger composed only of bread and beef? Each part needs to be present: A soggy or missing bun would cause your fingers to slip immediately into the beef without being able to hold and enjoy the burger. But if your burger had no beef in the middle, you'd be left with two dry pieces of bread. Your thesis statement could read: "Information technology has revolutionized the way we work. The final sentences of your introduction, then, would be a mini-outline of what your essay will cover. Don't use an outline form, but explain briefly all the key points you intend to discuss in narrative form. These would include well-researched and logical points that support your thesis. Bellevue explains that your supporting paragraphs should provide rich, vivid imagery, or Against Interpretation: And Other Essays and specific supporting details, depending on your topic. A Against Interpretation: And Other Essays supporting paragraph for the technology topic, discussed previously, could draw on current events. In its Jan. The younger, hipper, agency, by contrast, had Against Interpretation: And Other Essays with Facebook Inc.
[Show full text]
Critique and Postcritique
CRITIQUE AND POSTCRITIQUE ELIZABETH S. ANKER AND RITA FELSKI, editors CRITIQUE AND POSTCRITIQUE CRITIQUE AND POSTCRITIQUE ELIZABETH S. ANKER & RITA FELSKI, EDITORS duke university press Durham and London 2017 © 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Anker, Elizabeth S. (Elizabeth Susan), [date]— editor. | Felski, Rita, [date]— editor. Title: Critique and postcritique / Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, editors. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: lccn 2016042487 (print) lccn 2016043715 (ebook) isbn 9780822363613 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822363767 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822373049 (e- book) Subjects: lcsh: Criticism. | Criticism— Methodology. | Hermeneutics. Classifi cation: lcc pn81 .c853 2017 (print) | lcc pn81 (ebook) | ddc 801/.95— dc23 lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016042487 Cover art: Alma Th omas, Hydrangeas Spring Song, 1976. Acrylic on canvas. 198.1 × 121.9 cm. Courtesy of Charles Th omas Lewis and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object Number 2002201. 125th Anniversary Acquisi- tion. Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Julius Rosenwald II in honor of René and Sarah Carr d’Harnoncourt, Th e Judith Rothschild Foundation, and with other funds being raised in honor of the 125th Anniversary of the museum and in cele bration of African American art, 2002. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski PART I. COUNTERTRADITIONS OF CRITIQUE 1 “Nothing Is Hidden”: From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein on Critique 31 Toril Moi 2 Th e Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Prob lem of Critique 50 Heather Love 3 Th e Eighteenth- Century Origins of Critique 73 Simon During PART II.
[Show full text]
Post-Theory and Beyond E-ISSN 2596-304X Pós-Teoria E Além
artigos doi: https://doi.org/10.1590/2596-304x20212342lfv ISSN 0103-6963 Post-Theory and Beyond e-ISSN 2596-304X Pós-teoria e além Luiz Fernando Valente Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Department of Comparative Literature. Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT This article surveys and assesses the eclectic trends in literary theory and criticism in the post- theory age with a focus on three rubrics: the cultural turn, the historic turn, and the affective turn. It concludes with a consideration of the current debate about symptomatic reading versus surface reading. KEYWORDS: cultural; historic; affective; symptomatic; surface. RESUMO Esse artigo faz um levantamento do eclético panorama da teoria e da crítica literárias na era da pós-teoria, avaliando-o a partir de três rubricas: a virada cultural, a virada histórica, e a virada afetiva. Conclui com uma reflexão sobre o debate atual entre leitura sintomática e leitura de superfície. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: cultural; histórico; afetivo; sintomático; superfície. editores: Regina Zilberman Gerson Roberto Neumann submetido: 29.09.2020 aceito: 22.10.2020 INTRODUCTION: THEORY AND POST THEORY headline in the October 13, 1993 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a requisite publication for anyone concerned with the como citar: VALENTE, Luiz Fernando. professional debates in the North American academy, announced Post-Theory and Beyond. theA “beginning of the Age of Post-Theory” (WINKLER, 1993, n/p) after Rev. Bra. Lit. Comp., Porto a thirty-year dominance of what had become known as high theory. In Alegre, v. 23, n. 42, p. 21-37, jan./abr., 2021.
[Show full text]
Review Article in the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag's Critical Modernism
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. IX, No. 1, 2017 0975-2935 DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v9n1.35 Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V9/n1/v9n135.pdf Review Article In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism Mena Mitrano, In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 214 Pages, £70.00, ISBN 978-1-4744-1434-0. Reviewed by Rajni Singh Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-1569-8339. Email: [email protected] Mena Mitrano’s In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism is an illuminating archival scrutiny of Sontag’s conflicting cravings for ‘knowledge and experience’. The book lays open the rich and diverse intellectual experiences of a young and aspiring writer who wished to transform literary criticism into a privileged space of reflection. Mitrano affirms that Sontag’s cry for ‘new’ brought her accolades (but only in the later part of her career) as well as condemnation. René Wellek paired her with Roland Barthes and rejected her for her appeal for a ‘new’ beginning by tagging her as a destroyer of criticism. As Mitrano shows, Sontag's archive “remains largely understudied” (2) the project presents ‘the Sontag’ who chose to be anti-philosopher or rather ‘non-traditional philosopher’. The archive of Sontag is examined under seven headings: ‘Thoughts about Thinking: Approaching Sontag’, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Critical Theory’, ‘The Public Intellectual’, ‘Modernism and Theory’, ‘Iconologies’, ‘Aura, Dread and the Amateur’, and ‘Interlocution’.
[Show full text]
Edward Said, Marxism, and the Valences of Critique
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century How to Cite: Ryan, R C and Fitz Gerald, J 2018 Form at its Limits: Edward Said, Marxism, and the Valences of Critique. Open Library of Humanities, 4(2): 1, pp. 1–21, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.241 Published: 20 July 2018 Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Open Library of Humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. Robert Cashin Ryan and James Fitz Gerald, ‘Form at its Limits: Edward Said, Marxism, and the Valences of Critique’ (2018) 4(2): 1 Open Library of Humanities, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.241 WHAT’S LEFT? MARXISM, LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY Form at its Limits: Edward Said, Marxism, and the Valences of Critique Robert Cashin Ryan1 and James Fitz Gerald2 1 University of Illinois-Chicago, US 2 Binghamton University, US Corresponding author: Robert Cashin Ryan ([email protected]) In his 1936 essay ‘Narrate or Describe’, György Lukács writes: ‘when a writer attempts as an observer and describer to achieve a comprehensive description, he must either reject any principle of selection, undertake an inexhaustible labour of Sisyphus or simply emphasize the picturesque and superficial aspects best adapted to description’.
[Show full text]
Illness As Metaphor Susan Sontag
Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag January 26, 1978 issue Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. I want to describe not what it’s really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and to live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation; not real geography but stereotypes of national character. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill —is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry. I Two diseases have been spectacularly, and similarly, encumbered by the trappings of metaphor: tuberculosis and cancer. The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are first of all responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
[Show full text]
Performing Cancer: Toward an Aesthetic of the Unpresentable
i PERFORMING CANCER: TOWARD AN AESTHETIC OF THE UNPRESENTABLE by Virginia Dakari A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, In fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece September 2016 ii PERFORMING CANCER: TOWARD AN AESTHETIC OF THE UNPRESENTABLE by Virginia Dakari Has been approved September 2016 Dissertation Committee: APPROVED Savas Patsalidis, Supervisor ____________________ Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Co-Advisor ____________________ Domna Pastourmatzi, Co-Advisor ____________________ Department Chairperson: ACCEPTED Michalis Milapides ____________________ iii This dissertation is dedicated to my mother iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. vi Abstract.............................................................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1 PART I: THEORETICAL VIEWS ABOUT PAIN, ILLNESS, AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNPRESENTABLE IN PERFORMANCE CHAPTER 1 Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: The story behind the essay and a critical fallacy............................................................ 40 CHAPTER 2 Theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the experience and expression of suffering..............................................................................................
[Show full text]
“Artistic Utopia”: Susan Sontag's Modern Interpretation of American Spirits Song Shenli
Review of Arts and Humanities June 2014, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 31-48 ISSN: 2334-2927 (Print), 2334-2935 (Online) Copyright © The Author(s). 2014. All Rights Reserved. Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development Self Exile & Redemption in the “Artistic Utopia”: Susan Sontag’s Modern Interpretation of American Spirits Song Shenli (宋沈黎)1 Abstract As a highly visible international figure for her established fame in the literary and critic circle, Susan Sontag has produced many influential works covering a wide range of fields and diverse topics, including social criticism, literary creation, cultural studies, and political critiques. Based on the study of her major work In America, the author of this thesis attempts to examine the relationship between the artistic self- consciousness of creative writings and the innovative contextualization of the reality in order to situate her contributions within the conception of the intellectual life in the United States. Through an in-depth analysis of Sontag’s understanding of the modern American society as presented in her historical novels, the author tries to make investigations on such subjects as American spirits, American characters and the American Dreams, of which Sontag offers a new definition in her creative writings Keywords: American Spirit; national identity; American Dreams; Utopia In a world in which culture and particularly religion shape the allegiances, the alliances, and the antagonisms of people on every continent, Americans could again find their national identity and their national purposes in their culture and religion. — Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We The influential yet controversial American writer and critic Susan Sontag, whose writings cover a wide range of fields, including social criticism, literary creation, cultural studies, and political critiques, is reputable for her sharp insight and profound learning.
[Show full text]
Susan Sontag Illness As Metaphor 1978
The fantasies concocted around cancer, and around tuberculosis in earlier times, undergo close examination in Susan Son- tag's brilliant new book, Illness as Meta phor. Her subject is the unreal and often punitive uses of illness as a figure or meta phor in our culture. Her point is that ill ness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is to resist such metaphoric thinking. The fantasies have flourished, as she shows, because cancer and tuberculosis are regarded as much more than possibly fatal diseases: they arc identified with death, as in Kafka's description of his TB as "the germ of death itself/' and in Ceoig Grod deek's pronouncement, anticipating Wil hclni Reich, that "what is not fatal is not cancer/1 Her examples of metaphors and images of illness are taken from medical and psychiatric thinking as well as from sources ranging from Greek and medieval writings to Keats, Dickens, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Mann, Joyce, Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Auden, and many others in our own time. Sontag compares the currently fashion able theory of a cancer-prone personality type with the nineteenth-century theories which ascribed tuberculosis to depressing emotions. She analyzes the peculiarly modern predilection for psychological ex planations of disease, and argues that "a large part of the popularity and persuasive ness of psychology comes from its being a (continued on back flap) hy Susan Sontag NOVELS The Benefactor Death Kit ESSAYS Against Interpretation Trip to Hanoi Styles of Radical Will On Photography Illness as Metaphor FILMSCRIPTS Duet for Cannibals Brother Carl inncss as Metapfo or Illness as Metaphor SUSAK SONTAG Farrar, Straus and Giroux NEW YORK Copyright © 1977, 1978 by Susan Son tag All rights reserved First printing Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto Designed by Dorris Huth Illness as Metaphor first appeared, in an earlier ver sion, in The New York Review of Books, Vol.
[Show full text]