Susan Sontag Biography and List of Works

American 'new intellectual' and writer, a leading commentator on modern culture, whose innovative essays on such diverse subjects as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography, AIDS, and revolution have gained wide attention. Sontag has published novels and short stories, and written and directed films. She has had a great impact on experimental art in the 1960s and 1970s and she introduced many new ideas to American culture.

"Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs."
(from On Photography, 1977)

Susan Sontag was born in New York, N.Y. Sontag's father, Jack Rosenblatt, had a fur trading business in China - he died of pulmonary tuberculosis when she was five. Her mother, Mildred, married Capt. Nathan Sontag seven years later. Sontag grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles California, and at the age of fifteen (1948) the University of California at Berkeley. After a year she transferred to the University of Chicago, and graduated in 1951. Sontag married the 28-year-old Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor, in her sophomore year; they divorced in the late 1950s. Sontag moved with Rieff to Boston and continued her studies at Harvard, where she was a Ph.D. candidate from 1955-1957.

In 1957-58 Sontag studied at the University of Paris. She worked as a lecturer in philosophy at the City College of New York and Sarah Lawrence. From 1960 to 1964 she was an instructor in the religion department of Columbia University, and then a writer-in-residence for one year at Rutgers. In the 1960s Sontag's connection with the Partisan Review brought her into close contact with the 'New York intellectuals'. She contributed to various other periodicals, including New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, Nation, and Harper's.

As a novelist Sontag started her career at the age of 30 with THE BENEFACTOR. This heavily symbolic work is partly a pastiche of the 19th-century Bildungsroman, a novel about the formation of character. In the story the protagonist, Hippolyte, a wealthy man, attempts to make his daily life conform to his bizarre dreams and to have them serve as a solutions to his normal life. Hippolyte finally achieves complete freedom by rejecting outside interpretations of his real/dream life, and finds peace living in silence. The novel prepared the way for Sontag's essays about art - she states that people should not attempt to find the 'meaning' in a work of art but experience it as a thing in itself.

In the bohemian New York scene of the early sixties, Sontag swiftly acquired a reputation as the radical-liberal American woman, who had not only deep knowledge ancient and modern European culture, but could also reinterpret it from the American point of view. A selection of her writings appeared in AGAINS INTERPRETATION AND OTHER ESSAYS (1968), in which she states that the understanding of art begins from an intuitive response and not from analysis or intellectual considerations.

"A work of art is a thing in the world, not just text or commentary on the world." Rejecting interpretation, Sontag advocates what she called 'transparency', which means 'experiencing the luminousness of thing in itself, of things being what they are'. The 'meaning' of art lies in the experiencing both style and content together without analysis. "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." Sontag's other influential works include THE STYLE OF RADICAL WILL (1969), which continues her explorations of contemporary culture and such phenomena as drugs, pornography, cinema and modern art and music. ON PHOTOGRAPHY (1976) is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Here Sontag develops further her concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. ILLNES AND METAPHOR (1978) was written after her cancer treatment .In it Sontag's outlines her belief that although illness is used often punitatively as a figure or metaphor, the most truthful way is to resist such metaphoric thinking. The book was later revised and expanded as AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS (1988).

"If consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little minds, Sontag's mind must be very large, for she has never been stopped by her own last pronouncement. In the past decade, for instance, while continuing to champion the kind of elliptical European fiction that meets her much elaborated and stringent critical standards, she began writing best-selling, plot-heavy novels. But whatever the position or wherever the situation, Sontag has managed to hold the limelight as few of her kind have done."
(Daphne Merkin in 'The Dark Lady of the Intellectuals', The New York Times on the Web, October 29, 2000)

Son tag's second novel, DEATH KIT (1967), is a nightmarish meditation on life, death and the relationship between the two. Like The Benefactor, the fragmented protagonist cannot always distinguish between dream and reality. Sontag's collection of short stories, I, ETCETERA, appeared in 1977. In 1992 Sontag published her third novel, THE VOLCANO LOVER, which became a bestseller. The story is set in the 18th century, and depicts a drama between the 56-year- old ambassador sir William Hamilton, his 20-year-old wife Lady Emma Hamilton, and the hero of the age, Lord Nelson, who beat Napoleon but lost his battle for a woman. It is also a story of revolution and the position of women, written in a manner that approaches the formality of late 18th-century English. After the books publication Sontag declared her intention to concentrate on writing fiction rather than essays.

"The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as ''age-old ethnic hatreds.''? (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)"
(from 'Why Are We in Kosovo?' 1999)

Sontag's novel IN AMERICA (1999) is based upon a real story. It depicts a woman's search for self-transformation. The protagonist is Maryna Zalewska, an actress, who travels in 1876 with her family and a group of Poles to California to found a "utopian" commune.

In addition to essays and novels, Sontag has written screenplays for experimental films and edited selected writings of Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud (1976). HOMO POETICUS (1995) is a selection of Danilo Kis' essays and interviews, for which Sontag has written an introduction. Among Sontag's several awards are American Academy Ingram Merrill Foundation Award (1976), National Book Critics Circle Award (1977), Academy of Sciences and Literature Award (Germany, 1979). In 1979 she was appointed Member of the American Academy. In 1990 Sontag received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.

For further reading: Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist by Sohnya Sayres (1989); Conversations with Susan Sontag by Leland Poague (1995); Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion by Liam Kennedy (1995); Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (2000) .- Films and filmscripts: Duet for Cannibals (1970), Brother Carl (1974), Promised Lands (1974), Unguided Tour (1983)

FREUD: THE MIND OF THE MORALIST, (1959)