Hostname: page-component-6b989bf9dc-wj8jn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-14T08:59:54.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Culture, Aestheticism, And Ethics: Sontag and The “Idea of Europe”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Rubin Suleiman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

After her death, susan sontag was portrayed in many obituaries (including one i wrote for the french daily Le Monde) as an intellectual who had moved from the formalism and aestheticism of her early work to the ethically engaged stance of her later essays, right up to the last one she published in her lifetime, the stinging indictment of American torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Sontag was eloquent, as well as somewhat despairing, in her diagnosis of an “increasing acceptance of brutality” and a “culture of shamelessness” in American life (“Regarding the Torture” 28–29); similarly, after September 11, 2001, she did not hesitate to denounce (in a brief essay that earned her the label of “un-American” in some quarters) the “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators” in the days following the attack (“Comment”).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 3 , May 2005 , pp. 839 - 842
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. 1989. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday, 1990. 89–183.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Answers to a Questionnaire.” 1997. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. New York: Farrar, 2001. 294–98.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Comment: Tuesday, and After.” New Yorker 24 Sept. 2001: 32.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” 1975. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, 1980. 73–102.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy).” 1988. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. New York: Farrar, 2001. 281–89.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. In America. 2000. London: Vintage, 2001.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.‘” 1964. Against Interpretation. New York: Doubleday, 1990. 275–92.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “On Style.” 1965. Against Interpretation. New York: Doubleday, 1990. 15–36.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Pilgrimage.” New Yorker 21 Dec. 1987: 38–54.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination.” 1967. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Dell, 1981. 35–73.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times Magazine 23 May 2004: 24+.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “What's Happening in America? (1966).” Styles of Radical Will. New York: Dell, 1981. 193–204.Google Scholar