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 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
 
 

 

Books by Susan Sontag

In America / I, Etcetera / The Volcano Lover / Illness as Metaphor / Aids and Metaphors / Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Styles of Radical Will / The Story of the Eye / Under the Sign of Saturn /  On Photography  / Regarding the Pain of Others

Where the Stress Falls / Homo Poeticus / Conversations with Susan Sontag / Alice in Bed / A Susan Sontag Reader

Death Kit / Duet for Cannibals / The Benefactor

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Regarding the Pain of Others

By Susan Sontag (1933 - )

Biography and Bibliography

One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was born in New York City in 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford.

Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit,  The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories,I, Etcetera; a play, Alice in Bed; and six works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography  and Illness as Metaphor . In 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader, in 2001, Where the Stress Falls a collection of forty-one essays. Styles of Radical Will , another essay collected appeared in 2002.

Her stories and essays have appeared in THE NEW YORKER, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, ART IN AMERICA, ANTAEUS, PARNASSUS, THE THREEPENNY REVIEW, THE NATION, GRANTA, and many other magazines here and abroad. Her much anthologized story "The Way We Live Now" (1987) was chosen for inclusion in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE EIGHTIES and, more recently, in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY, edited by John Updike.

Her books are translated into twenty-six languages. Ms. Sontag has written and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; PROMISED LANDS (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and UNGUIDED TOUR (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had many productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. A more recent play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, and Korea.

Ms. Sontag has also directed plays in the United States and Europe; her most recent theater work was a staging of Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

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.

Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow. Ms. Sontag lives in New York City. She is at work on another collection of short fiction.

You can also read more about Ms. Sontag's life and views by reading her conversation with Bill Moyers an by visiting her Web site, which provides excerpts from all her books. You can sample Sontag's work as a critic by visiting THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS' Sontag page, which offers dozens of her essays dating between 1963 and 2003.

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 a wide attention. Sontag has published novels and short stories, and written and directed films. She 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 entered 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 in her sophomore year the 28-year-old Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor; 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 in 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. The heavily symbolic work was 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 to serve as solutions to his normal life. Hippolyte finally achieves complete freedom by rejecting outside interpretations of his real/dream life, and finds peace at living in silence. The novel prepared way for Sontag's essays about art - she stated that people should not attempt to find the 'meaning' in a work of art but experience it as a thing in itself.

On 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 Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1968), where she stated that the understanding of art starts from 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 advocated 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 Styles of Radical Will (1969), which continued her explorations of contemporary culture and such phenomena as drugs, pornography, cinema and modern art and music.

On Photography  (1976) was a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag developed 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 photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. Later the famous celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, Sontag's close friend, has told that her views have deeply influenced her life. "When I first met her, she said, 'You could be good,' and I've always been trying to rise to that place," Leibovitz said in an interview.

Illness and Metaphor (1978) was written after Sontag's cancer treatment. Her point was 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 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)

Sontag's second novel, Death Kit (1967), a was a nightmarish meditation on life, death and the relationship between the two. Like in The Benefactor, the fragmented protagonist cannot always distinguish between dream and reality. Sontag's short stories, I, Etcetera, appeared in 1977. In 1992 Sontag published her third novel, The Volcano Lover, which became a bestseller. It has been translated among others into Finnish. The story was set in the 18th century, and depicted 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 won Napoleon but lost his victory 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 appearance of the book Sontag has declared that she will 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) was based on a real story. It depicted 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. When the commune fails, Maryna returns successfully on the stage. The work received the National Book Award in 2000. Where the Stress Falls  (2001), a collection of essays, made William Deresiewicz in The New York Times attack on Sontag's position as America's leading intellectual: "While Where the Stress Falls  won't do much to enhance her stature as a thinker, never before has she made such large claims for her moral pre-eminence, her exemplary fulfillment of the intellectual's mission as society's conscience.

In effect, she's the first person in a long while to nominate herself so publicly for sainthood." (The New York Times, November 4, 2001) The novelist Lisa Appignanesi notes in her review that what sets Sontag apart from most of her academic contemporaries is that "if they care, they can't seem to think; and if they can think, they're often too grand to care" (from Independent, 19 January 2002).

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, in 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). She was appointed in 1979 Member of American Academy. In 1990 Sontag received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. Her private life Sontag has kept carefully guarded. However, in an interview in The New York Times she told that she had loved both men and women.

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) - Suom.: Sontagilta on myös suomennettu essee Lihan estetiikka: teatteri Artaud'n mukaan (1968) ja Vallankumouksen taide (1971).

Selected works:

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updated 9 October 2007

 

 

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Related files: Regarding the Pain of Others Reviews   Sontag Bibliography