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The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for January
| Susan Sontag, Writer and Critic, has died aged 71.Born Susan Rosenblatt, Sontag wrote fiction, criticism, and shot four films, including Promised Lands, about Israel in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. A provacative figure, she was praised by Carlos Fuentes, who likened her to Erasmus as "a communicator in this broken-down world." |
Susan
Sontag |
| One of America's best-known and most admired writers, she was born in New York City in 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford. 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 books have been translated into thirty-two languages. |
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Essential Reading
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Regarding
the Pain of Others
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A startling reappraisal of the intersection of information, news, art, and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewers. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
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First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of "transparency". When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photography freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid essays, the most famous being "Plato's Cave" make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.
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Against Interpretation
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Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought. This edition has a new afterward, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of he battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.
Illness as Metaphor: and AIDS and Its Metaphors "Illness as Metaphor" is an examination of the fantasies concocted around conditions such as cancer and tuberculosis in our cultural history. Susan Sontag argues that illness is not a metaphor and that the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is to resist such thinking. Her examples of metaphors and images of illness are taken from medical and psychiatric thinking as well as from sources ranging from Greek and Medieval writings to Dickens, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Frank Lloyd Wright, Auden and others. "Aids and its Metaphors", the sequel, is obviously written in the light of the Aids crisis. Sontag states that our metaphors for Aids and its effects may be damaging; they suggest an apocalypse in personal and social terms, and therefore threaten not only the victims of the disease but all of society. I,
Etcetera
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. Previous
Authors of the Month Also
Recommended:
(£7.99)
(£8.99)
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Saul Bellow
Henry Roth
John Updike
