Conversations with Susan Sontag (Literary Conversations) [Paperback]

Leland Poague (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Literary Conversations | Publication Date: December 1, 1995

Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic.

Born in New York City, reared in Arizona and California, educated at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne, appointed to teaching positions in English, philosophy, and religion, she is a woman whose restlessly independent and resolutely transcultural temperament was already well established when she boxed up the manuscript of The Benefactor and submitted it to Farrar & Straus in 1962. By 1992, when her much acclaimed novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance was published, The Benefactor alone had gone through twenty-one editions in nine languages.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Poague has collected more than 20 interviews with Sontag, beginning with a 1969 conversation with Edwin Newman and moving on up through the decades. This chronological structure charts the progression of Sontag's books, the evolution of her viewpoints, and her rise in stature from a brash young critic mocking radical chic to a cancer survivor pondering the cultural dimensions of disease in Illness as Metaphor (1978). Sontag, preferring philosophy to biography, asked that genuine interviews rather than mere profiles be selected for this collection, but what is most exciting about these vibrant and intellectual dialogues is Sontag's curiosity and vitality and the glimpses we get into her life. Sontag's erudition and brilliance may be intimidating, but her passion for thought and language is invigorating and inspiring. And it's a pleasure to hear her speak about her education; admit, in an animated Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott in 1978, that rock and roll liberated her from a sterile academic life; and describe her love of film and theater and ongoing involvement with great works of literature. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (December 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878058346
• ISBN-13: 978-0878058341
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,341,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The philosopher as virtuosa., December 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Conversations with Susan Sontag (Literary Conversations) (Paperback)

Why do I regard the publisher's remarks about this text being unabridged (read: sanitized to corporate "standards") with such lingering skepticism? Is is a question of having no faith in corporate ethics, or one of needing, however subconsciusly, to deny Sontag's virtuosity of intellect? If the transcribed interviews are reliably authentic, here is a mind quite literally capable of extemporizing sophisticated philosophical discourse. No wonder Camille Paglia attempted to make a cottage industry of ridiculing, belittling, and otherwise attacking this author, who not only anticipated many of Paglia's themes by decades, but who has also shown herself capable of stating in a few laconic phrases what takes Paglia (for all her verbal music) hypomanically-digressive chapters. This is a refreshingly intimate encounter with what "Hurricane Camille" herself has dubbed "one of the great minds of the Twentieth Century", in addition to being far more engaging reading than I had anticipated. Read Paglia's more serious endeavors to exercize your right brain; but read Sontag (this compilation included) to exercise your left. My only regret is noting that certain of the interviews included here were translated back into English from other languages: The smoothness of translation, for good or for ill, gave no clue.