Susan Sontag

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

Life an work

Susan Sontag took her B.A. at the University of Chicago and her M.A. at Radcliffe College. She also studied at Oxford University. Through her essays, which have been published in magazines and journals across the country, Sontag established a reputation as a critic of modern culture. Probably she will be remembered for her contribution to the theory of aesthetics.

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].

Her place of authority in the contemporary world of art criticism was confirmed with the publication, in 1976, of a series of essays - On Photography. "The photographer," Sontag writes in On Photography, "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." (1977: 15).

In her best-known work, Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag enunciates a theory of art based upon a reliance on the senses and not on the intellect. By her nonfiction writes Sontag demonstrate her ability to address current social and political realities with the same incisiveness that she approaches questions of art. In "Women's Beauty", which she first published in Vogue magazine in 1975, Sontag provides us with a feminist interpretation of the uses and misuses of "beauty" throughout history. This essay also serves as a model for those who would question a variety of accepted moral, ethical, and social standards.

Literature

Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977. Download.
Monographs
Novels
  • Death Kit, 1967
  • The Volcano Lover, 1992
  • In America, 2000
Essay collections
  • "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
  • with Peter Hujar, Portraits in life and death, Da Capo Press, 1976
  • Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980
  • Where the Stress Falls, 2001
  • Regarding the Pain of Others, 2002
  • At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches, 2007
  • A Susan Sontag Reader, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick, London, 1983
Articles, papers, chapters, reviews
Articles, papers, interviews and reviews on Sontag
Bibliography
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