Notes on Sontag
Regular price
€21.99
A01=Phillip Lopate
Adventurism
Aestheticism
Against Interpretation
Alice James
Ambivalence
Anti-intellectualism
Aphorism
Art for art's sake
Atonality
Author_Phillip Lopate
Category=DNL
Category=DS
Category=JBSF1
Criticism
Donald Barthelme
Elias Canetti
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Essay
Experimental theatre
Fiction
Fiction writing
Georges Bataille
Greatness
Humour
Illness as Metaphor
In Parenthesis
Irony
Jeremiad
Joyce Carol Oates
Life Against Death
Like Crazy
Literature
Machado de Assis
Mary McCarthy (author)
Melodrama
Memoir
Modernism
Narrative
Nathalie Sarraute
Non-fiction
Novelist
On Photography
Paul Goodman
Persona
Philip Rieff
Philistinism
Photography
Politics and the English Language
Pornography
Postmodernism
Prose
Psychology
R. D. Laing
Rhetoric
Robert Bresson
Robert Mapplethorpe
Roland Barthes
Ryan's Daughter
Science fiction film
Self-healing
Sensibility
Seriousness
Sexual Preference (book)
Simone Weil
Smirk
Susan Sontag
The Last Sentence
The Volcano Lover
Thought
Ugly American (pejorative)
Walter Benjamin
Where the Stress Falls
Whittaker Chambers
Wilhelm Reich
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691135700
- Weight: 28g
- Dimensions: 111 x 184mm
- Publication Date: 29 Mar 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of ...our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman.
But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.
Phillip Lopate is the author of many books, including the essay collections "Getting Personal" (Basic), "Against Joie de Vivre" (Simon & Schuster), "Portrait of My Body" (Doubleday), and "Bachelorhood" (Little, Brown), as well as the anthology, "The Art of the Personal Essay" (Doubleday). Among his other books is "Waterfront: A Walk around Manhattan" (Crown). He teaches writing at Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
