Susan Sontag: Mind As Passion

by Liam Kennedy

Susan Sontag has been a major figure in American intellectual life for over thirty years. She has consistently broken fresh ground in cultural analysis and provocatively engaged a wide range of socio-political issues. This study provides a critical introduction to her essays and fiction, illustrating how her aesthetic and political concerns are shaped by her role as a public intellectual within the New York tradition. Liam Kennedy presents Sontag as a modernist "writer-intellectual" who has produced a distinctive critical perspective on such diverse subjects as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography, AIDS and revolution. The book provides a detailed critical analysis of the poetics and politics of Sontag's intellectual generalism. She is presented as a singular interpreter and exponent of high modernist aesthetics who has built a major body of textual work around her strong "sense of an ending", a perspective on late modernist culture which unites her diverse interests and spans her essays and fiction.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Professor Liam Kennedy is Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He has diverse research interests and teaching experiences, spanning the fields of American urban studies, visual culture, globalisation and transatlantic relations.

He is the author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995) and Race and Urban Space in American Culture (2000). He is co-editor of Urban Space and Representation (1999) and City Sites: An Electronic Book (2000), and editor of Remaking Birmingham: The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration (2004).

Professor Kennedy's work is interdisciplinary, blending cultural and political modes of scholarly analysis, and represents American Studies as a valuable framework to study both American domestic and international affairs.

He is currently researching a monograph on photography and international conflict, and preparing two edited books - on urban photography and on cultural diplomacy and US foreign policy.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

for written in the 90's it gives a male approximation & critical voice to Sontag's writings.