Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, professor, literary icon, and political activist.

Life an works

Beginning with the publication of her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'", Sontag became an international cultural and intellectual celebrity. Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Her often provocative essays and speeches sometimes drew criticism. The New York Review of Books called her "one of the most influential critics of her generation" [1]. "The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecological safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures." (Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977: 15).

Books

Articles, papers, reviews

• "Film and Theatre", The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1966):24-37
• "Looking at War", The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2002:82-98
• "Regarding the torture of others", New York Times, May 23, 2004:24
• "At the same time... (the novelist and moral reasoning)", English Studies in Africa, 48:1, 2005:5-17
• "An argument about beauty", Dædalus, (Fall 2005):208-2013

Collections of essays

• "Notes on camp", Camp: queer aesthetics and the performing subject: a reader, (1964): 53-65.
• Against Interpretation (includes "Notes on 'Camp'"), 1966
• Styles of Radical Will, 1969
• Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980
• Where the Stress Falls, 2001
• Regarding the Pain of Others, 2002
• At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches, 2007

Monographs

• On Photography, 1977
• Illness as Metaphor, 1978
• AIDS and Its Metaphors (a continuation of Illness as Metaphor), 1988
• Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

Articles, papers, reviews about Susan Sontag

• Sohnya Sayres, "Susan Sontag and the Practice of Modernism", American Literary History, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Autumn, 1989):593-611
• Barbara Clow, "Who's Afraid of Susan Sontag? or, the Myths and Metaphors of Cancer Reconsidered", Social History of Medicine, Vol. 14, no. 2, 2001:293-312
• "Art and Conssciousness" (Susan Sontag interviewed by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta), Performing Arts Journal", 80 (2005):1–9
• Chad MCCRACKEN, book reviews (Lopate, Phillip, Notes on Sontag. Princeton University Press, 2009; Sontag, Susan. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, Edited by David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68:2 Spring 2010:175-197.
• Clive Joinson, "On Photography by Susan Sontag" (book review), The ArtBook, vol. 17, no. 1, february 2010:70

Books about Susan Sontag

• Leland A. Poague, Kathy A. Parsons, Susan Sontag. An Annotated Bibliography, 1948-1992, Modern Critics and Critical Studies, vol. 22, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol. 1065, 2000