Sontag, Susan (1933—2004)
American literary and cultural critic. Born in New York City, but raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, Sontag gained a BA from the University of Chicago. She did graduate work at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, but never completed a higher degree. She taught briefly at Columbia University, but for most of her life she lived by her writing. Her essay ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964), which first appeared in The New York Review of Books and was later included in her landmark collection Against Interpretation (1966), caused a sensation, propelling her into literary stardom and the role of public intellectual. For many, this essay defined the sensibility of the 1960s. Similarly, the title essay of Against Interpretation resonated strongly with the literary critical zeitgeist, which was then moving rapidly towards postmodernism. Sontag’s essay celebrated what art could not say, its silences, as the highest form of what art could achieve; she also insisted that art should primarily be thought of as an experience, and that this was beyond interpretation. For this reason, Sontag championed a number of European writers, such as Benjamin, Walter, Barthes, Roland, and Artaud, Antonin, bringing their work to the attention of Anglophone readers. Like Barthes, Sontag had a profound interest in the visual image, particularly the photograph. Her book-length essay On Photography (1977) is still a touchstone for media studies today. In the 1970s, Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer. Chronicling the way cancer changes how the sufferer is perceived by society, Sontag wrote two powerful books on the cultural construction of disease, Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and its Metaphors (1988). Combining her interest in illness and photography, she wrote an affecting response to 9/11 and the march to war that followed entitled Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). In her final years, she lived with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, who chronicled her illness and even her death in pictures. She died in 2004 shortly after the massive Indian Ocean tsunami which killed more than a quarter of a million people, effectively denying her the front-page farewell she might well have otherwise had, but also in a way proving her thesis about the power of images. She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.