Susan Sontag, R.I.P.

[Dave Monroe]

December 28, 2004
Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71
By MARGALIT FOX

Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose
impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally
impassioned political pronouncements made her one of
the most lionized presences - and one of the most
polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died yesterday
morning in Manhattan. She was 71 and lived in
Manhattan.

The cause was complications of acute myelogenous
leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who
died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had
been ill with cancer intermittently for the last 30
years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous
books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor"
(1978).

A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960's,
Ms. Sontag wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a
volume of short stories and was also an occasional
filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four
decades her work was part of the contemporary canon,
discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the
pages of popular magazines to the Hollywood movie
"Bull Durham."

Ms. Sontag's work made a radical break with
traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully
blurring the boundaries between high and popular
culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the
study of culture, championing style over content. She
was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both
meanings of the term.

"The theme that runs through Susan's writing is this
lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance
between the moral and the aesthetic," Leon Wieseltier,
literary editor of The New Republic and an old friend
of Ms. Sontag's, said in a telephone interview
yesterday. "There was something unusually vivid about
her writing. That's why even if one disagrees with it
- as I did frequently - it was unusually stimulating.
She showed you things you hadn't seen before; she had
a way of reopening questions."

Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag
remained irreconcilably divided. She was described,
variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original,
derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof,
condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic,
sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing,
left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless,
dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral,
reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé,
ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic,
humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous
and clever. No one ever called her dull.

Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels "Death
Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover" (1992) and "In
America" (2000); the essay collections "Against
Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will"
(1969) and "Under the Sign of Saturn" (1980); the
critical studies "On Photography" (1977) and "AIDS and
Its Metaphors" (1989); and the short-story collection
"I, Etcetera" (1978). One of her most famous works,
however, was not a book, but an essay, "Notes on
Camp," published in 1964 and still widely read.

Her most recent book, published last year, was
"Regarding the Pain of Others," a long essay on the
imagery of war and disaster. One of her last published
essays, "Regarding the Torture of Others," written in
response to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans
at Abu Ghraib, appeared in the May 23, 2004, issue of
The New York Times Magazine....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/books/28cnd-sont.html


		
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