A Susan Sontag Reader

by Susan Sontag

Selections from the noted writer's past books, arranged chronologically, include excerpts from her novels and short story collection, famous essays from the 1960s, pieces from her two subsequent essay collections, and part of "On Photography"

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Criticism, Art, Theory, Womens

446 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.

Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.

Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.

Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

Reviews

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mostly jumped around in this, for I must admit that I hadn't read all the books or seen all the films she was talking about and am not likely to get around to them. I think you either cover that stuff in college or during a certain time in your life or you don't. But there was enough there that grabbed me. People often say her fiction is not as compelling as the rest of her work, but I wish, as she apparently did, that she'd pursued fiction more, or been encouraged to, because her writing is vivid and ideas-y and I think could have out DFW'd DFW if she'd given it room. The Benefactor excerpts... so European in tone. Of course quite slow-moving and ultimately I drifted away, but it was just that she was using a tired old form to try to explore consciousness and selfhood in an original way, and it didn't work. I'm really interested to read In America, though, because the first pages grab me totally.

Project for a trip to China was utterly lively. Non-linear, and outside of the thesis, topic-sentence structure of many of the other pieces assembled here. With those, though the ideas are exciting, you can pretty much skim the topic sentences and get the idea.

Which I confess I did a lot.

The best pieces, I thought, because they have held up so well with time, were those on fascism and Walter Benjamin, because they help us understand what is still going on today, how scenography is still so important--how fascism is theater first and foremost--how it is performed. It is reality TV. It is Trump. It isn't about the content, it's about participation in ritual. The desire to lose the self in something larger--almost the emptier the better.

The opportunities for that in modern life are legion. We've spent a lot of time passing around definitions of fascism on Facebook and the like lately. But again, I wouldn't worry too much about whether we're talking about the technical definition, ie, what fascism actually espouses or doesn't espouse. I'd just look at whether people are joining up and participating in certain types of group thinks, where the entertainment and "entrainment" values are high.

Yeah, that's a big-time warning.

[Yu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has a really good introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick. She points out several very important aspects in Susan Sontag's career (as top sentences appearing in a paragraph), however, in the following sentences, I could not agree with her on some ideas.

Since this is an introduction for a book of Susan Sontag's excerpts, it doesn't have to be a professional essay or academic article. But I feel the obligation to demonstrate the difference between Susan Sontag's essay and fiction. Her fictions could be divided into two periods. The first period, is The Benefactor and Death Kit. These two novels are what Elizabeth meant by "unexpected", because they do not read as reasonable as her essays. But there is connections in her knowledge as she is an intellectual with these two novels. From her journals and notes, there lies the answer.

But later, she wrote two more novels, historical novels, well-received. Due to this book is published before that, with the only two experimental books in heads, no wonder it is hard to understand.

[Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great intro to a major American writer, critic and thinker of the last century, preternaturally perceptive (for her time, and still today) on American society, its ever-evolving cultural and artistic fetishes, its dense metaphors and chameleonic complexions of commerce, technology, literature, film, pornography, taboo, propaganda, -genre and writing-itself that prose-chop a path into coherence and clarity. Missing some popular work from Illness as Metaphor, and I skipped her memoir-upfront, as well as fiction sections (no offends), but overall Susan Sontag's philosophies are represented well for anyone looking for a healthy introduction into her life and work. Kickass bonus: Elizabeth Hardwick's introduction.

[Gary Lang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite quote from her article on Godard: “Surely, Monsieur Godard,” asked an exasperated Georges Franju of his fellow French filmmaker, “you do at least acknowledge the necessity of having a beginning, middle and end in your films?”

“Certainly,” replied Godard, “but not necessarily in that order.”

[Gary Reger · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Susan Sontag burst onto the New York intellectual scene in 1964 with her essays "Notes on 'Camp'" and "Against Interpretation," she launched a career as first an enfante terrible (she was 33 that year) and eventually a reigning figure in a coterie of more or less independently-based critics and writers. She died in 2004 of cancer, about which she'd written earlier in Illness as Metaphor.

The Reader presents selections from her work between that golden year and 1982, when it was published. Reading through some of the essays today is a bit of a cognitively dissonant experience. On the one hand, her prose can be dazzling and is always sharp and pointed; on the other, her concerns can seem distant and far from speaking to our issues today. And behind her stunning sentences can lurk a vapidity revealed when you pause and interrogate them for what they are trying to say.

For instance: in the 1967 essay "The Pornographic Imagination," she analogizes pornography to science fiction, which she denigrates as a "somewhat shady sub-genre" (p. 206). At one point she writes of "[t]he ahistorical dream-like landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed--[which] occur almost as often in science fiction as they do in pornography" (p. 213). Nice writing--but what does it mean? What should we imagine by "congealed time" and the "ahistorical?"A minute's reflection reveals that neither expression actually applies in any critical sense to science fiction: it is a deeply historical genre, only its history is a possible history of the future; Sontag could have consulted a text like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series or H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, two of hundreds readily available examples. And just what is "congealed time" other than a clever phrase? That time is hardly "congealed"--frozen, immobile--in science fiction but can stretch over eons unimaginable is driven home by works like First and Last Men. A Story of the Near and Far Future
Her rehabilitation of some pornography--The Story of O and Georges Bataille's books--continues the project proclaimed in her manifesto "Against Interpretation," to which she rather coyly alludes ("I don't want to repeat here the arguments I have advanced elsewhere on behalf of a different critical approach," p. 211). But, ironically, her own drive to redeem pornography--again, some--as respectable literature, or maybe better, serious, pushes her to violate the stricture of the new criticism for which she has argued. In "Against Interpretation" she insisted that the necessity to interpret literature has led criticism to a dead end; she calls instead for critics to embrace a duty to describe. And yet here she falls back on good old interpretation by reading serious pornography as about death: be it literal death or the death of the self-actualized person, as O in her story.

So what shall we make of Sontag today? For me, her essays redound of the era when they were written. She belongs to a last generation of public intellectuals who were unaffiliated with--and so perhaps not captured by--the great institutions of American life, the university, or, now, the think tank. Who would be her avatar now? Journalists? At the same time, what does she have to say to us here in the twenty-first century? The concerns in "Against Interpretation" and "The Pornographic Imagination" feel passe: there are now burgeoning bodies of critical literature on both pornography and science fiction; some might say the latter is now the most relevant and powerful literature of our time (see, say, the many books of Kim Stanley Robinson). She herself illustrates how very hard it is indeed to suppress our deep human need to interpret our art; denying or refusing that need may be as hard as denying our sexuality.

Years ago I read The Volcano Lover, her novel that revolves around the life of Emma Hamilton, set in Naples. It is excellent. Perhaps it is really Sontag's fiction that represents her best achievement, and that she deserves to be remembered for.

[Maggie]

..."we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world--and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truthgiving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing."

"For the problem of art versus morality is a pseudo-problem. The distinction itself is a trap; its continued plausibility rests on not putting the ethical into question, but only the aesthetic. To argue on these grounds at all, seeking to defend the autonomy of the aesthetic (and I have, rather uneasily, done so myself), is already to grant something that should not be granted--namely, that there exist two independent sorts of response, the aesthetic and the ethical, which vie for our loyalty when we experience a work of art. As if during the experience one really had to choose between responsible and humane conduct, on the one hand, and the pleasurable stimulation fo the consciousness on the other!

"For it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice, and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral, and are not just blindly and unreflectively obeying. Art performs this "moral" task because the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life."

"For morality, unlike art, is ultimately justified by its utility: that it makes, or is supposed to make, life more humane and livable for us all. But consciousness--what used to be called, rather tendentiously, the faculty of contemplation--can be, and is, wider and more various than action.

"Absolved from the duty of classifying himself or appraising his surroundings."

"Art itself becomes a kind of counterviolence, seeking to loosen the grip upon consciousness of the habits of lifeless static verbalization, presenting models of "sensual speech."

comprehension -

[Tari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really prefer her essays to her prose, but these essays are just amazing.

[Mohammed omran · Rating 3 out of 5]

هذا ما تتقصاه (سوزان سونتاغ) في خطابها المذهل لقبول جائزة القدس عام ٢٠٠١ والذي نشر تحت عنوان “ضمير الكلمات” في كتابها (في آنٍ واحد: مقالات وخطابات). الكتاب الذي لا غنى عنه والذي نشر بعد وفاتها من مقتطفات أدبية مختارة أتاحت لنا مقالات عدة لـ(سونتاغ) عن الشجاعة الأخلاقية وقوة المقاومة المنضبطة للظلم، الأدب والحرية ، الجمال مقابل الجاذبية، ونصيحتها للكتاب.

تبدأ (سونتاغ) بقياس مرونة اللغة وقدرة الكلمات على تضخيم المعاني بالقدر نفسه الذي يمكنها به تقليصها.

نحن الكتاب تقلقنا الكلمات. تحمل الكلمات معاني وتشير إلى أشياء. الكلمات أسهم عالقه في الجلد الخشن للواقع. وكلما كانت الكلمات منمقة و متداولة كلما أصبحت تمثل غرف وأنفاق من الممكن أن تتسع أو أن تتداعى. يمكن للكلمات أن تحمل رائحة سيئة وغالبًا سوف تذكرنا بغرف أخرى حيث نفضل السكون أو غرف نظن فيها أننا بالفعل أحياء. من الممكن أيضًا أن تكون مساحات نخسر فيها فن وجزالة الاستقرار. وأخيرًا هذه الغايات العقلية الجسيمة التي لا نستطيع العيش فيها سوف تهجر وتتوارى وتغلق.

على سبيل المثال ماذا نقصد بكلمة “سلام”؟ هل نقصد غياب الاضطراب؟ هل نقصد النسيان؟ هل نقصد الغفران؟ هل نقصد إعياء عظيم ومرهق أم هل نقصد التجرد من الضغينة؟ يبدو لي أن ما يقصده معظم الناس “بالسلام” هو الانتصار. انتصار جانبهم، هذا ما يعنيه لهم “السلام” بينما يعني “السلام” للآخرين الهزيمة. يصبح السلام مساحة لا يعلم الإنسان كيف يستقر فيها.

تأملاً في الاسم الكامل للجائزة التي أنتجت خطابها – جائزة القدس لحرية الفرد في المجتمع – تتفكر (سونتاغ) في علاقة الكاتب بالكلمات كأدوات تمثل الكاتب شخصياً:

ليس مهماً ما يقوله الكاتب، المهم هو الكاتب نفسه.

الكتاب – ومن اقصد هم أعضاء الجماعة الأدبية – هم رموز للاجتهاد، وضرورة، الرؤية الفردية.

ولكن لأن “هناك الكثير مما يبعث التناقضات في كل شيء” كما لاحظت (سونتاغ) بأسى قبل ربع قرن، هنالك جانب مظلم لمفهوم الرؤية الفردية. في نص يتناسب جداً وعصرنا، عصر الانتشار الذاتي والهوية، (سونتاغ) التي عاشت خلال عصر الأنا كتبت:

الدعاية الترويجية الغير منقطعة في عصرنا “للفرد” تبدو لي مشبوهة جدًا فيما تصبح “الفردية” مرادفًا للأنانية. مجتمع رأسمالي يصبح مهتمًا بتمجيد “الفردية” و“الحرية” والذي من الممكن أن يعني أن لهذا المجتمع حق أبدي في تضخيم النفس والحرية في التخزين والاستيلاء والاستغلال والاستنزاف حتى يندثر هذا المجتمع.

أنا لا أؤمن بأن لتهذيب النفس قيمة وراثية وأعتقد أنه ليس هنالك حضارة، استخدم هذا المصطلح بشكل معياري، لا تملك مقياسًا للإيثار والاهتمام بالغير. أنا أؤمن بأن هنالك قيمة متأصلة في تعميق وعينا بما يمكن أن تكون عليه الحياة الإنسانية. إذا خاطبني الأدب كمشروع ، كقارئة أولاً وكاتبة ثانياً فما هو إلا امتداد لتعاطفي مع أنفس ومجالات و أحلام وكلمات واهتمامات أخرى.

في رؤية متضادة ثقافياً اليوم ، كما نرى مهن تبنى على أفكار معلقه متراكمة (سونتاغ) تعطي اعتبارًا لمهمة الكاتب الحقيقية:

على الكاتب أن لا يكون ماكِنَة آراء.. مهمة الكاتب الأولى هي قول الحقيقة لا امتلاك الآراء. يجب عليه أن يرفض مشاركة الأكاذيب والتضليلات. فالأدب هو بيت التباين والفروق الدقيقة ضد أصوات التبسيط ومهمة الكاتب هي أن يجعل تصديق لصوص الفكر صعباً. مهمة الكاتب هي السماح لنا برؤية العالم كما هو مليء بالكثير من الادعاءات والأجزاء والتجارب المختلفة.

إن مهمة الكاتب هي تصوير الحقائق: الحقائق المنحلة وحقائق الفرح. هذا هو جوهر الحكمة الأدبية، تعددية الإنجازات الأدبية، مساعدتنا على فهم أن ما يحدث الآن يحمل في طياته حدثاً آخر.

كلمات (سونتاغ) تنشر إدراك مؤلم لنزعتنا المعاصره في بناء آراء سريعة وغلط آراء مبنية على المعرفة بما هي أساساً أصداء لردود أفعال أخرى.

تلاحظ (سونتاغ): “من الفظاظة إشاعة آراء للعامة لا يملك الشخص فيها معرفة مباشرة عميقة. إذا تحدثت عن ما لا أعرف أو عن ما أعرف باستهتار فإن هذا مجرد تسويق للآراء. مشكلة الآراء هي أن الشخص يعلق فيها. وكلما تصرف الكتاب ككتاب فإنهم دائمًا يرون أكثر.”

توثيقًا لقوة الأدب في ضبط الفوارق البسطية للمعنى واحتفالًا بما تسميه الشاعره (إليزابيث ألكسندر) “تعددية المعاني والأصوات والمتحدثين” تضيف (سونتاغ):

إذا كان الأدب، هذا المشروع الضخم الذي تم تنظيمه، في مجال اختصاصنا، منذ ما يقارب آلاف السنين يتضمن الحكمة – وأنا أعتقد بأنه يتضمن الحكمة وأنها في الأصل جوهر ضرورة الأدب لدينا – فهو يتضمنها من خلال عرضه لازدواجية طبيعة مصائرنا الشخصية والجماعية. سوف يذكرنا باحتمالية وجود التناقضات وأحيانًا النزاعات التي لا يمكن اختزالها بين القيم التي نعتز بها كثيرًا.

هذا الإدراك بالتعددية والتكامل تنشأ منه أرفع مهة للأدب وأعظم جزاء. بعد قرون تلت أحد أعظم مؤثريها (هيغل)، والذي حذر من خطورة الآراء الثابتة، تكتب (سونتاغ):

الحكمة في الأدب معاكسة لامتلاك الآراء. تَوْرِيد الآراء، حتى الآراء الصحيحة – عندما تطلب – يرخص من قيمة ما يقوم به الشعراء والروائيون على أكمل وجه وهو مناصرة التفكر واستكشاف الغموض.

في رؤية مرتبطة ارتباطًا استثنائيًا بالحاضر، فيما يتزايد كفاحنا للعيش مع الحكمة في عصر المعلومات، تردد (سونتاغ) صدى أفكار بطلها والتر ينجامين الأبدية عن الفرق الجوهري بين المعرفة والتنوير، وتقدر مهمة الروائي المطلقة:

لن تستبدل المعرفة التنوير أبدًا. دع المشاهير والسياسيين يتحدثون معنا بدونية، يكذبون. لو أن كونك كاتبًا وصوتًا عامًا من الممكن أن يرمز إلى ما هو أفضل فإن ذلك سيكون اعتبار عملية تكوين الآراء والأحكام مسؤولية صعبة.

مشكلة أخرى مع الآراء هي أنها من محركات شل الحركة الذاتية. من المفترض أن ما يفعله الكتاب باستطاعته أن يحررنا ويهزنا. أن يفتح طرقًا للرأفة واهتمامات جديدة. وأن يسمح لنا بأن نتذكر أنه من الممكن أن نطمح في أن نصبح مختلفين وأفضل مما نحن عليه. أن نتذكر أننا نستطيع أن نتغير.

[Mary]

Sontag confuses me. I feel like she contradicts herself. Her essays and short stories are not for me so I won’t rate this book. I’ve been curious about her for decades and finally got around to a bio and these essays. Mission accomplished.

She makes rules when none are need IMO.
“A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—whatever the artist’s personal intentions—advocate anything at all.”
Reacting to a work of art “must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free beyond indignation and approval.”

These observations worry me.
“interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art”
She indicates that we are attracted to many of the Great Writers due to their “unhealthiness.” I’ve been concerned about creators and celebrities who seem mentally ill, have not overcome and are lauded for it or tolerated. I’m guilty of it myself but I try to stay aware. In politics, I observe Trump in a mental health decline yet he is revered by so many.
“The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness.”

These observations resonate.
If we see our own lives “from the outside. As the influence and popular dissemination of the social sciences and psychiatry has persuaded more and more people to do, we view ourselves as instances of generalities, and in so doing become profoundly and painfully alienated from our own experience and our humanity.”
“Dividing time into Past, Present and Future suggests that reality is distributed equally among the three parts, but in fact the past is the most real of all.”

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is for those who wish to dip their feet into Susan Sontag for the first time. A public intellectual who made literary, and at times political, headlines from the Sixties until her death, Sontag first strutted her stuff with an awful debut novel, THE BENEFACTOR, excerpted here, that nevertheless won her reviews in top magazines like TIME. Her breakthrough came with the now-classic essay, "Notes on Camp", written "for Oscar Wilde", dissecting such campy classics as the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles and old Joan Crawford movies. The article is hip, provocative and has stood the test of time. How many essays get cited on NICK AT NIGHT? Her double-whammy at the end of the Sixties, "Trip to Hanoi" and a contribution to a forum on "The State of America Today", show her angry, naive about the North Vietnamese, and kicking a hornet's nest with her line, "The white race is the cancer of humanity". The Seventies and Eighties saw Sontag tackle more private but still controversial concerns. "Fascinating Fascism" hurled a thunderbolt at Leni Riefenstal for making Aryans out of a Black tribe in the Sudan in her photo book, THE LAST OF THE NUBA. Sontag herself explored the possibilities and limitations of the camera in recording history and making art in "On Photography". Susan Sontag comes across in these pages as a humanist who was often furious with the world, and turned both concerns into literature.

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

1982, with essays [and excerpts from novels] going back as far as 1963.
Excellent introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick

Read maybe a quarter of it. I was mainly interested in the essays that became very famous, "Notes on Camp" and an excerpt from the book "On Photography".
So now I kind of, sort of, know what is meant by that word "camp" that has always puzzled me.

"The Image-World", from On Photography, is about China -- and this is back in 1977 that she wrote it -- is fascinating. starting p. 357.

"In China taking pictures is always a ritual"
"The Chinese resist the dismemberment of reality. Close-ups are not used"
"The Chinese don't want photographs to mean very much or to be very interesting. They do not want to see the world from an unusual angle, to discover new subjects. Photographs are supposed to display what has already been described."
"The only use the Chinese are allowed to make of their history is narrow, moralistic, deforming, uncurious.....All images reinforce and reiterate each other."

366: "A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex."

[Cory Primm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fully on board with her "Against Interpretation", intrigued by Hippolyte's demonstration of dreams that are difficult to interpret, and the character's steadfast refusal of opinions taken by Jean-Jacques, a priest, Frau Anders and another character. Interesting to find this line in Dostoevksy's "Demons", it's my interpretation that it is the etymology of the title: '“Come, that’s enough,” said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, with a wave of his hand.

“I dream of Petersburg,” cried Lebyadkin, passing quickly to another subject, as though there had been no mention of verses. “I dream of regeneration.… Benefactor! May I reckon that you won’t refuse the means for the journey? I’ve been waiting for you all the week as my sunshine.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort. I’ve scarcely any money left. And why should I give you money?”

'

Did not finish the book... There were immoralities in 'The Benefactor', and in 'Fascinating Fascism' I could not read it with a clear conscience. But maybe I will revisit 'On Style', 'On Photography', 'Writing Itself' and 'Under the Sign of Saturn' later

[Jacque · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Notes on Camp and i liked it a lot. Paged through the rest of it but it was kinda dense and went over my head … will revisit someday

[london · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes for the perfect party prop (inside joke)

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

اگرچه سوزان سونتاگ در ایران بیشتر به یک منتقد ادبی و اجتماعی نویس معروف است، و بی تردید در این زمینه ها کارهای بزرگی تالیف کرده است، اما رمان های سونتاگ کارهای زیبایی ست که ندیده یا نشنیده ام که به فارسی ترجمه شده باشد.علت این امر برایم روشن نیست که چرا بجز چند مقاله، دیگر آثار او به فارسی برگردانده نشده. تعجب من بیش تر از آن است که در میان فمینیست های نسل تازه در ایران هم کسی در زمینه ی ترجمه ی آثار سونتاگ اقدامی نکرده است. سوزان سونتاگ که از روشنفکران آمریکایی متعلق به دهه ی 1960 است، با همان دید رادیکال نسبت به جوامع غربی کار خود را شروع کرد. بعدها به شکلی از آمریکا زده شد و به تبعیدی خودخواسته به اروپا، سوئد و بعدن فرانسه رفت. سال های اقامت سونتاگ در اروپا یادآور بسیاری از نویسندگان نسل پیش از او همچون همینگوی است که بخشی از دوران جوانی و میانسالی شان را در اروپا و عمدتن فرانسه و شهر پاریس گذراندند. اگرچه سونتاگ در میان دانشگاهیان و در رسانه ها بیشتر به یک روشنفکر نق نقو و ایرادگیر معروف است، با این همه نمی توان از نقش او به عنوان یک زن نویسنده در روند تفکر دایره ی روشنفکری آمریکایی ها چشم پوشید.
رساله های سونتاگ در زمینه ی هنر و جامعه، گاه از رمان ها و کارهای ادبی اش جلوه ی بیشتر و بهتری دارند.

[Ci · Rating 1 out of 5]

In her essays, Sontag was eloquent and forceful, contemptuous against "philistines" who insisted to intellectualize art. They commit the high crime of interpretation through "contents". And the art here can be anything from paintings to novels. She cited many examples on modern masters -- how dare someone assigning Stanley of "a Streetcar named Desire" as the brutal force of a sensual barbarism? Right or wrongly; the fact that the offending Elia Kazan attempted such art is derisible.

There is no talking to this high priestess of modernity; one either listens or leaves. Here I leave her on her high altar by sneaking out quietly, and call this day of reading a brief, if at all, learnable experience.

[Katie]

I like her broad range of topics, although I didn't read all of the essays, especially in which she reviewed directors or other writers. She seems both within and outside of popular culture in a way that I admire. I particularly liked "Against Interpretation", which verbalizes a lot of my issues with interacting with and talking about something that is non-verbal or experiential. I would read more of her essays.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read every essay in this volume, but there are some real favorites in here. In later years, Sontag always ran the risk of not living up to her own opinion of herself, but some of the earlier essays, when she is just discovering Barthes, e.g., show a hunger for ideas about art and culture and a generalized ideal of what it means to be an intellectual that is subtle and inspiring.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only occasionally dated or jargony. Most of these pieces are still fresh and worth reading, even when they seem to be some of the earliest English-language surveys of someone like Godard or Barthes or Bresson.

[Shozo Hirono · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even though I admire her tastes (big, complex, ambitious, philosophical works), her writing style seems dated.