Back Essays of the 1960s & 70s

Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s

Against Interpretation | Styles of Radical Will | On Photography | Illness as Metaphor • uncollected essays More

Edited by David Rieff

“Susan Sontag’s essays are great interpretations, and even fulfillments, of what is really going on.”—Carlos Fuentes

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “A project of self-transformation”—Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Susan Sontag
September 25, 2019

Interviews David Rieff on how his mother, Susan Sontag, lived as “a citizen of the Republic of Letters”
September 17, 2019

Interviews Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
April 18, 2018

Susan Sontag was an incandescent presence in American culture, whether as essayist, fiction writer, filmmaker, or political activist. As a critic, she became the most provocative and influential voice of her time. More than a commentator on her era, she helped shape it. This volume brings together four essential works of the 1960s and 70s, books whose intelligence and brilliant style confirm her credo that “the highest duty of a writer is to write well—to leave the language in better rather than worse shape after one’s passage…Language is the body, and also the soul, of consciousness.”

With the publication of her first collection of critical essays, Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag took her place at the forefront of a period of cultural and political transformation. “What is important now,” she wrote, “is to recover our senses…In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Against Interpretation’s treatment of an astonishing range of subjects—camp sensibility, the films of Robert Bresson and Alain Resnais, the aesthetics of science-fiction and “happenings,” the work of such modern thinkers as Simone Weil and Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss—reveals Sontag as a catalyzing figure who opened provocative perspectives on every subject she addressed.

In Styles of Radical Will (1969), Sontag collected two of her longest and most ambitious essays, “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “The Pornographic Imagination,” along with penetrating studies of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran (one of many important modern writers Sontag introduced to American readers), and “Trip to Hanoi,” the record of a journey made at the height of the Vietnam War, reflecting both her deepening political involvement and the relentless analysis of her own motives that accompanied it.

On Photography (1977) began as a review of an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs and quickly evolved into an extended meditation on the premises and implications of photography as an art. Dazzlingly suggestive on every page, restlessly refusing to fall back on easy resolutions, it shows Sontag at the peak of her ability to connect disparate fields of thought and action, bringing aesthetics, history, politics, and philosophy into a common vision.

Sontag’s own medical crisis led her to write Illness as Metaphor (1978), undoubtedly the most influential of her writings. Her precise delineation of the stereotypes and fantasies attached to illnesses—here, tuberculosis and cancer—played a major part in realizing her stated goal: “an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them.” The courage and clarity of her writing, her impatience with lazy assumptions and inherited biases, are evident on every page.

This volume also includes six previously uncollected essays—studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon, and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement—along with a chronology of Sontag’s life and explanatory notes.

David Rieff, editor, is the author of Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir and editor of the journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag, of which two volumes have appeared to date. his many other books include At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention and A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. He lives in New York.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews “A project of self-transformation”—Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Susan Sontag
September 25, 2019

Interviews David Rieff on how his mother, Susan Sontag, lived as “a citizen of the Republic of Letters”
September 17, 2019

Interviews Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
April 18, 2018

Influences Maggie Nelson: American classics that influenced the writing of The Argonauts
November 24, 2015
Table of Contents

Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
I
Against Interpretation
On Style
II
The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer
Simone Weil
Camus’ Notebooks
Michel Leiris’ Manhood
The Anthropologist as Hero
The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács
Sartre’s Saint Genet
Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel
III
Ionesco
Reflections on The Deputy
The Death of Tragedy
Going to Theater, etc.
Marat/Sade/Artaud
IV
Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson
Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie
The Imagination of Disaster
Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures
Resnais’ Muriel
A Note on Novels and Films
V
Piety Without Content
Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death
Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition
Notes on “Camp”
One Culture and the New Sensibility

Styles of Radical Will (1969)
I
The Aesthetics of Silence
The Pornographic Imagination
“Thinking Against Oneself”: Reflections on Cioran
II
Theatre and Film
Bergman’s Persona
Godard
III
What’s Happening in America (1966)
Trip to Hanoi

On Photography (1977)
In Plato’s Cave
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
Melancholy Objects
The Heroism of Vision
Photographic Evangels
The Image-World
A Brief Anthology of Quotations

Illness As Metaphor (1978)

Uncollected Essays
William Burroughs and the Novel
The Double Standard of Aging
The Third World of Women
Francis Bacon: “About Being in Pain”
A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?
Beauty: How Will It Change Next?

30.00 List Price: $40.00 (Save: 25%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #202616

ISBN: 978-1-59853-255-5 875 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 246 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (paperback)

Art in America 1945–1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism LOA N°259

The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground (eBook)

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.