The Legacy of Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature& mdash;the willingness of great artists and writers to challenge and provoke, to scandalize a spectator or reader with the critical frankness, complexity, and sometimes even the beauty of their work. Sontag's life and work were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a limitless range of subjects& mdash;theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, illness& mdash;and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also provoked scorn. Her living was the embodiment of scandal.In this collection, Terry Castle, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, and other leading scholars confront Sontag's groundbreaking life and works anew. Against Interpretation; "Notes on Camp;" Letter from Hanoi; On Photography; Illness as Metaphor; I, Etcetera; and The Volcano Lover& mdash;these works form the center of essays no less passionate and imaginative than Sontag herself. They debate questions raised by the thinker's own images and identities, including her sexuality. They question Sontag's status as a female intellectual and her parallel interest in ambitious and prophetic fictional women; her ambivalence toward popular culture; and her personal and professional "scandals," such as the accusations of anti-Americanism that followed her essay on 9/11. Rare photographs and illustrations add another dimension to an understanding of Sontag's images and power.

About the Author
Barbara Ching is an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis and author of Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture.Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is associate professor of women's studies and English at Penn State University and author of A Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet.