Author:
Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004.
ImprintNew York : Library of America, [2013]
Imprint2013
Descriptionviii, 875 p. ; 21 cm.
Note:Includes index.
Note:Against interpretation -- Styles of radical will -- On photography -- Illness as a metaphor -- Uncollected essays.
Note:Susan Sontag was an American essayist, fiction writer, filmmaker, political activist, and critic. Against Interpretation's (1966) treatment of an astonishing range of subjects -- camp sensibility, the films of Robert Bresson and Alain Resnais, the aesthetics of science-fiction and "happenings," the work of such modern thinkers as Simone Weil and Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris and Claude Levi-Strauss -- reveals sontag as a catalyzing figure who opened provocative perspectives on every subject she addressed. In Styles of Radical Will (1969), Sontag collected two of her longest and most ambitious essays, "The Aesthetics of Silence" and "The Pornographic Imagination," along with penetrating studies of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc gocard, and the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, and "Trip to Hanoi," reflecting her deepening political involvement and the relentless analysis of her own motives that accompanied it. On Photography (1977) began as a review of an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs and quickly evolved into an extended meditation on the premises and implications of photography as an art. Sontag's own medical crisis led her to write Illness as Metaphor (1978). Her precise delineation of the stereotypes and fantasies attached to illnesses -- here, tuberculosis and cancer -- played a major part in realizing her stated goal: "an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them." This volume also includes six previously uncollected essays -- studies of William s. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon, and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement -- along with a chronology of Sontag's life and explanatory notes.
