« Musashi | Main | Reading: Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (1984) »
January 14, 2005
Susan Sontag, 1933 - 2004
Xinhuanet writes [1]:
"Susan Sontag, who died Tuesday [Deceember 30' at age 71 of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, was both the most rarefied and the least predictable of thinkers, drawn to the demands of high art but open to the kick of popular culture. ...Her fame began with her 1964 essay, "Notes on Camp," which popularized the "so bad it's good" attitude toward everything from Flash Gordon to feather boas. Over the next 40 years, she was immersed in foreign films, the pornographic imagination, silence, science fiction, avant-garde theater and the compatible pleasures of a Rauschenberg painting and the music of Diana Ross and the Supremes.
She drew criticism in the aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks when she said that the attacks were not cowardly but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."
"In America" is the paradigm of Sontag's novel.
Sontag had an insatiable passion for literature, with thousands of books — arranged by chronology and language — occupying, and defining, her New York apartment. She read writers from all over the world and is credited with introducing such European intellectuals as Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti to American readers. Like she told Rolling Stone magazine. "The main reason I read is that I enjoy it."
[1] Agencies, "71-year-old US author Susan Sontag dies of leukemia," December 30, 2004.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-12/30/content_2393375.htm
Her passing send me to the library to dig out Against Interpretation, the only book of her's I'd read.
The opening sentence in Against Interpretation is "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality." Bingo!
Posted by sjc at January 14, 2005 12:46 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)