susan sontag essays of the 1960s & 70s

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Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s (LOA #246)

Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays

By Susan Sontag Edited by David Rieff

Part of library of america susan sontag edition, category: literary criticism | movies & tv | performing arts | politics.

Sep 26, 2013 | ISBN 9781598532555 | 4-7/8 x 7-7/8 --> | ISBN 9781598532555 --> Buy

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About Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s (LOA #246)

With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation , in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. “What is important now,” she wrote, “is to recover our senses . . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontag’s son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation , Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement. LIBRARY OF AMERICA  is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Always provocative, even if you don’t agree with her, Susan Sontag was one of the most influential critics of the last fifty years. She came of age in and was a central player in the intellectual rigor of the 1960s and 1970s, and may have the reputation for pushing esoteric, highly sophisticated works of art, though one of her central texts, and the one with which she jumped into the critical world — Against Interpretation — argues for a more visceral, subjective critical response. Certainly her essays elicited such responses from readers. Recently The Library of America published an invaluable collection of Sontag’s early work in  Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s .

Review copy courtesy of The Library of America.

In 1966, at the age of thirty-three, Sontag published her first essay collection, Against Interpretation . With essays on subjects as varied as Camus’ Notebooks , Ionesco, Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie , and “camp,” the essay that provided the biggest splash is the title essay.

“Against Interpretation” is a seductive piece, particularly for someone like me who left the academy. In it, Sontag says:

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because no one knew (or thought one knew) what it did . From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

The type of theory that Sontag decries in this essay is “interpretation,” or a kind of reductive analysis that breaks a work up into its content and form. This essay was originally published in Evergreen Review in December 1964, and I know that still today there are many who experience a love of literature but who find that love crushed as they are forced to “interpret” texts (similarly, there are those whose true passion — and I mean that word — is just this kind of work). It’s not that Sontag wishes no one would critique a work of art (she does this through most of this book); it’s that she hopes that as we write about a work we find a language that “recover[s] our senses,” helps us “learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Of course, the essay has its critics. But, again, the underlying theme is so compelling — haven’t we all felt the sublime power of art? And wouldn’t it be wonderful to write intelligently about art without killing that reaction, to, as Sontag puts it, “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it”?

In 1969, Sontag published her second books of essays: Styles of Radical Will . Another work of criticism, this book of essays contains some more works on Godard, another on Ingmar Bergman’s (fantastic) film Persona , one entitled “The Aesthetics of Silence” (which I’m still trying to wrap my head around), and a provocative one entitled “Trip to Hanoi,” in which she describes North Vietnam with sympathy.

In the latest episode of The Eclipse Viewer, David Blakeslee and I talk about Jane Fonda’s own trip to Hanoi, and the famous picture taken there and that is taken apart by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin in  Letter to Jane (click here for a description and link to that episode. I found it fitting, then, that the next collection of essays in this book is Sontag’s On Photography , a 1977 compilation of essays on photography, particularly the politics of photography. This collection won the NBCC Award in 1977. I’m not up on writings about photography, but in researching about this collection I’ve found that it’s a central, go-to text for photography theorists.

So, let’s see, so far Sontag has covered aesthetic theory, literature, film, and photography. What’s left? Ah, illness.

A year after publishing On Photography , Sontag published Illness as Metaphor . At the time she wrote this monograph, she was being treated for breast cancer (though that does not come up in the text). Apparently at the time (and, I’m sure, today), there was the belief that cancer patients brought their disease upon themselves. This serves as an interesting springboard for Sontag, who understood that illness was being, in a way, “interpreted,” or, rather, that people were being interpreted through their illnesses, much like tuberculosis patients were read through their disease. But it’s more than that. Because these diseases have been deadly and incurable, they are mysterious. They become mystical and “acutely enough feared [to] be morally, if not literally, contagious.”

She begins:

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.

It’s a fascinating look at how illness forces people, needlessly, into the far corners of their lives. Naturally, many argue that illness also provides meaning, but, like all of the essays in here, even if you fundamentally disagree, it’s important to see this marvelous mind work through these various topics.

I’ve been pleased beyond my expectations by two extensive essay collections this year: this one and Simon Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness ( here ). If you don’t read essays or essay collections, might I suggest you stray from that habit here. These are intelligent, observant minds, an example to us of how to think, even if — especially if — it ultimately leads us to different conclusions.

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Essays of the 1960s & 70s

By susan sontag.

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With the publication of her first book, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. "What is important now," she wrote, "is to recover our senses ... In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E.M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontag's son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 825-852) and index.

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Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s (LOA #246): Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays Hardcover – Sept. 26 2013

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• Print length 875 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Library of America
• Publication date Sept. 26 2013
• Dimensions 13.21 x 2.54 x 20.83 cm
• ISBN-10 1598532553
• ISBN-13 978-1598532555
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library of America (Sept. 26 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 875 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1598532553
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1598532555
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 595 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 2.54 x 20.83 cm
• #5 in Modern Literary History & Criticism
• #62 in Film History & Criticism (Books)
• #71 in U.S. Fiction Anthologies

About the author

Susan sontag.

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

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arts entertainment Books

Book review: ‘Essays of the 1960s & 70s,’ by Susan Sontag

By dallasnews Administrator

2:25 PM on Nov 23, 2013 CST

Susan Sontag was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the 20th century and one of the best critics we’ve ever had. An essayist, art critic, theorist, screenwriter, filmmaker, director, political activist and novelist, her works often combined multiple elements from her areas of interest, deeply layering her pieces with comparisons between artistic genres, political analysis and cultural exploration.

She was an international intellectual and cultural celebrity, frequently publishing in The New York Review of Books , widely gave talks and was viewed as a role model by some in '60s and '70s feminist circles. And like almost everyone whose ideas live in a constant spotlight, she was often critiqued: for her comments after 9/11, and by, among others, Camille Paglia.

But the criticisms are only asides to this major voice, who, before she died in 2004, expressed sweeping intellectual interests and passionate advocacy for human rights, visiting war and conflict such as Vietnam and Sarajevo, and writing about maladies of modernity such as AIDS.

Now, the Library of America is publishing four of Sontag's major works from the '60s and '70s ( Against Interpretation , Styles of Radical Will , On Photography and Illness as Metaphor ) with six additional essays, edited by Sontag's son and longtime editor, David Rieff. Essays of the 1960s & 70s is massive; it's almost 900 pages.

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But the vastness here has little to do with page number. It is about the hugeness of Sontag’s intellect and the passionate rigor and vitality with which she attends to her wonderfully ranging topics.

Sontag first gained attention for her provocative pieces of cultural analysis and art criticism that were compiled in the 1966 collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays. She calls for critics to slough off the modern sensibility that she views as a destructive force, one that corrodes a piece of art. Instead of this breaking down of art, Sontag thinks criticism should "serve the work of art, not usurp its place," urging a return to an appreciative viewing of art, in which criticism pays attention to the sensuousness and vibrancy that art can call forth, a viewing that sees the "luminousness of the thing in itself."

Even though Sontag’s opinions are decades old, most of these pieces feel alive. In “The Imagination of Disaster,” for example, she deftly transitions from science-fiction films and directors to Shakespeare and other authors who use her view of the scientist, to historical and political visions of the apocalypse before closing the piece with the moral and philosophical provocations to which disaster films blind us.

Incredible technological advancement has occurred since the publication of On Photography 36 years ago. Almost everyone has a camera with them at all times today, filmless cameras that allow millions of photographs to be taken without consideration or care, photos of high quality that can be artistically manipulated with little technological know-how.

Sontag’s discussion about the historical relationship fine art has with the photograph is illuminating, a brightness that she shines on theories (by artists and critics) about what photography allows one to see or not see. Her sensitivity to modernity and mass production and the implications these issues have within the frenzied need our culture has to produce and consume are crucial to understanding where we find ourselves today.

Essays of the 1960s & 70s is a must-have. It collects some of the most important texts of the second half of the 21st century. Whether one is intimately invested in Sontag's insights into theater or film, or her submersion into the linguistics and rhetoric of sickness (especially cancer) in Illness as a Metaphor , or wants to read about the historical, moral, artistic and political evolution of ideas, she remains relevant. And this collection is more packed with passionate and intellectual buzzing than any of the benumbed cultural intellectuals writing today.

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner) and four collections of poetry. The Wish Book will be published in January. He teaches at Texas Christian University.

[email protected]

Essays of the 1960s & 70s

Susan Sontag

(Library of America, $40)

dallasnews Administrator

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So It’s About Time I Asked, Who Is Susan Sontag?

Recently, I had a choice of two books to review: Camille Paglia’s new collection of reprints and Susan Sontag’s early collected work. My editor would have been happy if I had opted to read both of them, but I chose only Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s. Why did I do this? For very many years, I wouldn’t go near Sontag. Other than myself, the person most to blame for this is undoubtedly Paglia.

As a young feminist possessed of above average academic abilities and a taste for committing offenses in the culture wars, I turned easily to Paglia as an inspirational how-to manual for tearing things down. Her tendency to name big names, to relate everything back to the narrow slice of Greco-Roman history that she studied, to go after the fissures in canonical works of art, to eschew footnotes, to fling campy insults, to give didactic speeches shot through with cutting adjectives — all this appealed to me immensely. A good deal of the voice you encounter from me today was made in the image of a Camille Paglia that I studied for so long.

And Paglia ultimately despised Sontag, perhaps more than any other feminist that preceded her, because Paglia was herself at first easily taken in by Sontag until their supposedly disastrous reading at Bennington in 1973. Later, in the ’90s, she wrote the “Sontag, Bloody Sontag” essay that appeared in Vamps and Tramps (Vintage, 1994). These two writers increasingly diverged in many important ways. Only one of them was really out of the closet. They had different views on warfighting, on French theory, on presidential politics. In my youth, agreeing with Paglia and parroting her style of criticism felt effortless — the raised eyebrows of my peers notwithstanding.

Rounding the bend into middle age, where many facets of my past ideological fashion are beginning to show their juvenile naiveté, I was drawn to Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s to see what I’d been missing. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that I was missing a lot. The Library of America has conveniently divided Sontag’s life in two, technically by the decades, but also loosely into before and during the lasting influence of her relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz. There’s the early collection including essay from the ’60s and ’70s, and then Later Essays has essays from the ’80s through her death in 2004. These two volumes contain all nine of Sontag’s major works and both were edited by her only child, David Rieff, a foreign policy analyst and former Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Her first work was Against Interpretation (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), which won me over immediately on the acknowledgements page, wherein Sontag is happy to admit that she has often said things with which she herself later disagreed. No foolish consistencies here and no unified theory of the field of her own previous works. That alone was so refreshing. Imagine Paglia ever earnestly admitting she was wrong about anything.

The bulk of this work aims to interpret the works of other artists. Many of these were favorites of mine — Camus, Genet, Artaud. Others were foreign to me — Weil, Ionesco, Norman O. Brown — but I found myself sucked into her engagement with their ideas perhaps even more so than with the essays on those whose works I’ve read before. Sontag has a way of distilling a work of art into a precise description that needs surprisingly little in the way of textual evidence. She goes by feeling and makes little pretense of historical underpinning, makes no effort to rely upon the scholarship of generations past.

Sontag declares that too many discussions of art now constitute “the intellect’s revenge” upon artistry itself. If that’s not a description of Paglia, who had barely graduated high school at the time, I don’t know what is. This direct approach continues on through Styles of Radical Will , originally published in 1969, with additional considerations of particular works of art, but also engagement with broader concepts. In Against Interpretation , she’d just begun to touch things categorically, as with “Notes on ‘Camp’”. Styles of Radical Will goes further with “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “The Pornographic Imagination” alongside treatments of Cioran, Bergman, and Goddard among others.

By this time, she was facing serious public backlash for an essay in The Partisan Review wherein she drew a metaphor that linked white civilization with cancer. Some of her later work, especially Illness as Metaphor in 1978, would serve as apologism for those earlier remarks. Imagine Paglia, whose every aspiration is rooted in the pinnacles of Hellenic culture and the good graces of Harold Bloom, ever saying a harsh word against Western civilization.

This book also includes Sontag’s On Photography from 1977, which was the first of many engagements with the medium. She displays a firm grasp on Warhol and Arbus, for which she won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2003, Sontag would revise her sentiments contained in this book with those in Regarding the Pain of Others . The same is true for 1989’s AIDS and Its Metaphors in relation to Illness as Metaphor . Sontag has a wide variety of artistic concerns upon which her ideology expands and contracts over the course of her 50 years as a publishing theorist, often repudiating her younger selves in the process.

I don’t know when I stopped feeling that it was bold to simply call out the ills of society and the foibles of other writers. I can’t recall the first time it felt really good to admit the ridiculousness of something I spouted off a long time ago. What I do know is that I’ve been struggling to take Paglia seriously while also subbing in a block of salt for the chip on my shoulder regarding my own work. There’s this terrific academic legend about their seemingly one-sided rivalry:

Paglia: I’m the Susan Sontag of the ’90s. Sontag: Who is Camille Paglia?

While I may toss my rebellious street cred perilously close to mainstream normativity by declaring it, I’m pretty much ready to put Camille Paglia in my intellectual dustbin next to Ayn Rand. I owe a great debt to both thinkers, and it seems my responsibility now is to get beyond them. In a decade or two, I suppose I’m likely to outgrow Susan Sontag as well. But today is not that day. Today, I’m trying not to underline every single passage in Essays of the 1960s & 70s because I’m excited to know: Who is Susan Sontag?

• Sontag's 'Duet for Cannibals' and the Games People Play - PopMatters

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• Publisher Library of America
• Publication date 2013
• ISBN 10  1598532553
• ISBN 13  9781598532555
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition number 1
• Number of pages 875
• Editor Rieff David

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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. What is important now, she wrote, is to recover our senses . . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontags son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781598532555

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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. First Edition. With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. What is important now, she wrote, is to recover our senses . . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontags son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. Seller Inventory # DADAX1598532553

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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