|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Picador, 2001) Literary critic and author Susan Sontag's collection of 26 essays, written between 1961 and 1965, is an oft considered quintessential text of that mythical period known popularly as The Sixties. These terse cultural chronicles range in theme from new wave cinema to pop art to modern literature and summarily argue for a new form of criticism in which style trumps content. Benjamin DeMott writes for the New York Times Book Review, "Spiky, jealous of her preferences, seemingly exacerbated by the very notion that others may share them, Miss Sontag obliquely confirms that enthusiasts of the new art tend to be people who need a badge of difference from the herd. Impatient, restless, her nerve ends visible in sentence after sentence (can't bear it, can't stand it), she further testifies that one pleasure offered by the new art is a release from that prison of patience and ploddingness into which traditional art locks its audience." (January 23, 1966, Page 239) Sontag says of her own work, thirty years later, in the Threepenny Review, "I was filled with evangelical zeal...I saw myself as a newly minted warrior in a very old battle: against philistinism, against ethical and aesthetic shallowness and indifference." (Threepenny Review, Summer 1996, Issue 66) MORE: Sontag’s web site, including a collection of reviews and a short bio Author bio on Pegasos, a literature-related resource site |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||