Susan Sontagová Knihy

Autorka známa čitateľom zatiaľ skôr ako prenikavá esejistka a kritička rozohráva na širokom plátne svoje historické romance osudové dráma Williama Hamiltona, jeho ženy Emmy a admirála Nelsona na farbisto zachytenom pozadí Neapola závere 18. storočia. Príbeh citovo chladného aristokrata a diplomata, vášnivého zberateľa umenia a amatérskeho prírodovedca, jeho mladé druhej ženy a jej ambiciózneho a krutosti sa nestranícího milenca nezaprie autorkino bohaté myšlienkové zázemie, určite však zaujme svojou nápaditosťou, plastickosťou, zmyslom pre humor a iróniu i nezabudnuteľným panoptikum farbisto vykreslených postáv.

In her most recent collection of essays, "one of America's foremost critics" (Washington Post ) discusses the relationship between moral and esthetic ideas.

Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock? In this investigation of the role of imagery in our culture, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001. Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world

In 1978, while recovering from cancer, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as metaphor, the celebrated essay on the invented and often punitive uses of illness in our culture. It was not surprising that a decade later, after the advent of AIDS, Sontag felt compelled to write a sequel that would counter the almost universal labeling of AIDS as a "plague". Published together in one volume these works are brimming with humane and original ideas about disease and the modern condition

"[C]onsiders the relationship of photography to art, to conscience, and to knowledge ... There are illuminating discussions of the work of such important photographers as Nadar, Muybridge, Stieglitz, Atget, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, August Sander, Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and others."

With the publication of her first book, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era 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." She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E.M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontag's son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.

"These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation."--Back cover

Susan Sontag, one of the most internationally renowned and controversial intellectuals of the latter half of the twentieth century, still provokes. In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a founding contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion ever made it to print. Now, more than three decades later, Yale University Press is proud to publish the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings and observations reveal the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at a moment when she was at the peak of her powers. Nearly a decade after her death, these hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist." Sontag proclaims a personal credo, declaring: "Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking."