Conversations with Susan Sontag (Literary Conversations Series) (Paperback)

~ Leland Poague (Editor) "Mr. Newman: Hello, I'm Edwin Newman..." (more)
Key Phrases: fascist aesthetics, pornographic imagination, Susan Sontag, Miss Sontag, New York (more...)

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 Description

Covering the period from 1967 to 1993, this collection of interviews gives attention to Sontag's education--Berkeley, Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne--and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, and covers Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist and cultural critic.

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 (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #420,203 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars literate overview of Sontag interviews from the sixties to the nineties, September 24, 2006

By	40s50sfan "40s50sfan" (San Antonio, Texas) - See all my reviews

These essays of Sontag's deal in a small part with questions of taste in the fields of art and literature. Also with the encroachments of post modernism onto the Enlightenment education Sontag received in the nineteen fifties. Also, they provide a little context to some of the books Sontag wrote during her lifetime. Sontag always took her subjects and her work seriously, in a culture that frequently asks that we ridicule ourselves and our work.