Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
disease mystery illness
Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
photography real done
Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.
faces communism fascism
Communism is fascism with a human face.
cancer pregnancy demonic
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
art tasks culture
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.
art past would-be
art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
art successful transgression
The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
art ideas analysis
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
art propaganda intention
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
art silence elements
The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
art giving purpose
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
art intelligent moral
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
beauty beautiful overwhelmed
The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.
education silly book
I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.