A Susan Sontag Reader

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466880783
Total Pages : 604 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Susan Sontag Reader written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Sontag occupies a special place in Modern American letters. She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident in A Susan Sontag Reader than in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing. A Susan Sontag Reader is arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, and from her collections of short stories, I, etcetera. The famous essays from the 1960s--"Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," and "On Style"--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays, Styles of Radical Will and Under the Sign of Satury. A part of Sontag's best-selling On Photography is also included. It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with "Writing Itself," a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which, in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements. This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466853581
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Styles of Radical Will written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

Author : Sigrid Nunez
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1594633347
Total Pages : 131 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sempre Susan written by Sigrid Nunez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award. "The masterpiece of the ‘I knew Susan’ minigenre" – A.O. Scott, The New York Times A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America’s most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute. Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, “Who says we have to live like everyone else?” Sontag’s influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as “a natural mentor” who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, “someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer’s vocation.” Published more than six years after Sontag’s death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466853573
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Regarding the Pain of Others written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466853557
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I, etcetera written by Susan Sontag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Photography written by Susan Sontag and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Phillip Lopate
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400829879
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Notes on Sontag written by Phillip Lopate and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374100721
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At the Same Time written by Susan Sontag and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-03-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the Same Time" gathers 16 essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag's life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 1250621348
Total Pages : 9 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Notes on "Camp" written by Susan Sontag and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-06-14 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the greatest prose stylists of any generation, the essay that inspired the theme of the 2019 Met Gala, Camp: Notes on Fashion Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility—unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it—that goes by the cult name of “Camp.” So begins Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” Originally published in 1964 and included in her landmark debut essay collection Against Interpretation, Sontag’s notes set out to define something that even the most well-informed could describe only as “I know it when I see it.” At once grounded in a sweeping history (Louis XIV was pure Camp) and entirely provisional, Camp delights in low and high culture alike. Tiffany lamps, the androgynous beauty of Greta Garbo, King Kong (1933), and Mozart all embody the Camp sensibility for Sontag—an almost ineffable blend of artifice, extravagance, playfulness, and a deadly seriousness. At the time Sontag published her essay, Camp, as a subversion of sexual norms, had also become a private code of signification for queer communities. In nearly every genre and form—from visual art, décor, and fashion to writing, music, and film—Camp continues to be redefined today, as seen in the 2019 Met Gala that took Sontag’s essay as the basis for its theme. “Style is everything,” Sontag tells us, and as Time magazine points out, “ ‘Notes on “Camp” ’ launched a new way of thinking,” paving the way for a whole new style of cultural criticism, and describing what is, in many ways, the defining sensibility of our culture today.

Author : Carl Rollyson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496808460
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Susan Sontag written by Carl Rollyson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of the influential writer's life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag's newly released private correspondence--including emails--and the letters and memoirs of those who knew her best. The authors reveal as never before her early years in Tucson and Los Angeles, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her longing for her absent father, and her precocious achievements at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Papers, diaries, and lecture notes, many accessible for the first time, spark a passionate fire in this biography. The authors follow Sontag as she abruptly ends an early first marriage, establishes herself in Paris, and embraces the open lifestyle she began as a teenager in Berkeley. As a single mother she struggled with teaching at Columbia University and other colleges while aiming for a career as a novelist and essayist. Eventually she made her own way in New York City after acquiring her one and only publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In her later years Sontag became a world figure, a tastemaker, dramatist, and political activist who risked her life in besieged Sarajevo. Love affairs with men and women troubled her. Diagnosed with cancer, she responded with determination, and her experience with illness inspired some of her best writing. This biography shows Sontag always craving "more life" at whatever cost and depicts her harrowing final decline even as she resisted terminal cancer. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated presents in candid and stark relief a new assessment of a heroic and controversial figure.