Among the literary stars of the radical 1960s, Susan Sontag (born 1933) produced numerous works evaluating and commenting on contemporary life and literature. Her essays appeared in nearly every major...
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Susan Sontag, cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and filmmaker, was born 16 January 1933 in New York City. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California, and at the age of fifteen (194...
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Although Susan Sontag is best known as a critic, she has more than once expressed regret for having devoted so much time to having written the essays that brought her renown. As she once explained to ...
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Critical Essay by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
Whatever became of Camp, both High and Low? A few years ago, before the Revolution became the fashion in New York, there was a period when just about all you hear...
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Critical Essay by Alfred Kazin
Susan Sontag is a [grim] figure, for the idea of alternatives in every possible situation always replaces the bread of life. In her novels as in her essays, she is conce...
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Critical Essay by John B. Breslin
Susan Sontag is best known as a critic who has insistently reminded American readers that a vast contemporary world of thought and imagination continues to evolve on ...
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Critical Essay by Liz Mednick
Among the world's foremost equivalencers, Susan Sontag is a perpetual curiosity, especially noteworthy for her unequivocal promotion of unlikely equations whose vi...
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Critical Essay by Jay Parini
Sontag has done an able job of editing [A Barthes Reader], and her introduction is thoughtful, an elegiac retrospective, what in the eighteenth century would have been cal...
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Critical Essay by Richard Gilman
[The following excerpt is taken from an essay originally published in The New Republic, May 3, 1969.]
That Susan Sontag is philosophically oriented and has something o...
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Critical Essay by Vernon Young
In that ideal Republic which is invoked by anyone who writes a criticism of life, Susan Sontag would have no status, since her mind is nourished solely on products of de...
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Critical Essay by William Phillips
More than any other writer today, Susan Sontag has suffered from bad criticism and good publicity. If she could be rescued from all her culture-hungry interpreters, ...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Hardwick
Susan Sontag: the name is a resonance of qualities, of quality itself. The drama of the idea, the composition, a recognition from the past that tells us what the p...
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Critical Essay by Walter Kendrick
A fully established American figure, Sontag is ready for the archive; and so, appropriately, we have A Susan Sontag Reader. It's not the Reader—maybe th...
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In the following review, Urbanski writes that the subject matter of Alice in Bed is challenging and interesting but the play suffers from numerous limitations.
How do you write a play about emptiness,...
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In the following essay, Frank explores the relationship between camp and gay culture in Sontag's writing.
—I think the main question people have is, creature, what is it you want?
...
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In the following interview, Sontag discusses her production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo.
[Munk]: What did you hope to achieve, coming here?
[Sontag]: My original motivatio...
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In the following review of Alice in Bed, Lewis argues that Sontag fails to bring her characters to life and concludes that the best part of the book is the afterword in which Sontag explains her inten...
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In the review below, Tonkin suggests how themes in Sontag's career contributed to her writing Alice in Bed.
Last year, Susan Sontag defied Serbian gunnery and media mockery to direct Waiting Fo...
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Below, MacFarquhar reviews Liam Kennedy's Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion, a study of Sontag's writings and their historical context.
There are certain poignant little facts sprinkled arou...
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In the following interview, conducted in July, 1994, Sontag reveals the authors who have inspired and influenced her literary career, comments on the craft of writing, and elaborates on the different ...
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In the following essay, Kimball explores the inconsistencies he has found in several of Sontag's essays. Kimball argues against many of Sontag's conclusions, noting that she frequently c...
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In the following review, Wood contends that in contemporary society the historical novel has become an overworked and tedious genre, but that In America is an exception, characterizing the book as nic...
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In the following review, Wood analyzes the depiction of self-determination in In America, noting that many of Sontag's theories on society, American culture, and human will are apparent in the ...
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In the following review, McLemee expresses his disappointment with the essays in Where the Stress Falls, finding Sontag's approach egotistical and clichéd, and asserting the writing lack...
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In the following review of A Susan Sontag Reader, Goodman studies the vehemence and political leanings of Sontag's essays throughout her career. Goodman asserts that Sontag is becoming less rad...
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In the following review, Nelson examines the changing tones amongst the essays collected in Where the Stress Falls.
You showed that it was not necessary to be unhappy,” Susan Sontag writes in &...
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In the following essay, Rollyson explores the similarities between Hippolyte, the main character in The Benefactor, and John Neal, the protagonist in Kenneth Burke's Towards a Better Life.
The ...
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In the following review, Spalding finds that Sontag's essays in Where the Stress Falls appear pessimistic concerning the state of current arts and society, and deems that Sontag is at her best ...
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In the following review, McDonald comments on Sontag's study Regarding the Pain of Others, noting the various potential effects that photographs can produce in modern viewers constantly inundat...
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In the following essay, Todorov analyzes human preoccupation with suffering, and categorizes Regarding the Pain of Others as a valuable study in this phenomenon.
One of the great platitudes of our epo...
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In the following review, Nehamas praises Sontag's opinions in Regarding the Pain of Others, contending that she makes honest assertions about the effects that pictures depicting brutality and s...
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In the following review, Kleinman praises Regarding the Pain of Others for not only displaying human fascination with images of death and pain, but for urging readers to view such images with sympathy...
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In the following review, Lester compares and contrasts Regarding the Pain of Others with Brian Goldfarb's Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom.
All images that display th...
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In the following review, Dyer judges Sontag as a master of the essay form, praising her work AIDS and Its Metaphors as well as the earlier essay Illness as Metaphor.
Twelve years ago, when Susan Sonta...
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In the following review, Maitland agrees with Sontag's assessment in AIDS and Its Metaphors that society views certain diseases as more than physical ailments, but also as social issues centeri...
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In the following essay, Sayres examines both Sontag's fiction and her essays, focusing on her epigrammatic style, her multilayered studies into contradictions and negations, and modernist theor...
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In the following essay, Gilbert discusses Sontag's writings on cancer and AIDS, using interview quotes to illustrate the author's opinions and confusion surrounding the social implicatio...
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In the following review, Lewis provides a negative assessment of Alice in Bed, contending that the character's words and actions are inaccurate, implausible, and laden with banalities and trite...
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Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
