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Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays Paperback – November 9, 2002

by Susan Sontag (Author)

6 customer reviews

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This third essay collection by America's leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In this collection, Sontag masters all she chooses to survey. She is a noble appreciator. Integrity, wholeness, large-sighted vision are intrinsic to Sontag's care for the intellectual life....Under the Sign of Saturn includes two long articles that belong together: the famed, polemical, whipping of Leni Riefenstahl's laundered reputation and camp cult of fascist art, and her stunning analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany.... After this feast, I am eager for her thoughts on anything.” ―Chicago Sun-Times

“A self-described ‘besotted aesthete' and ‘obsessed moralist,' Sontag, more than most writers of her generation, views the everyday business of thinking and feeling as dialectical aspects of one another. Refining that sensibility while attending to the more provocative issues of the day, Sontag has created a body of work of exemplary merit.” ―The Boston Globe

“No one has written more passionately about Antonin Artaud....Nor has anyone before Sontag taken the pains to demolish so thoroughly Hitler's favorite moviemaker, Leni Riefenstahl. This is one of the crack essays in the book.” ―Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, including In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories; several plays, and five works of nonfiction, among them Against Interpretation and On Photography. Her latest book is Regarding the Pain of Others (FSG, 2002). Her books have been translated into 28 languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.

Product details

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Picador; First edition (November 9, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780312420086
ISBN-13: 978-0312420086
ASIN: 0312420080
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 6 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,391,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5970 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays
- #6069 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Ethics & Morality
- #7689 in Books > Arts & Photography > History & Criticism > Criticism

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June 18, 2006

Format: Paperback

Sontag has once again compiled an intelligent collection of essays on widely varying aesthetic topics. Though she begins with a rather artificial and patronizing obituary for the late man of letters Paul Goodman, whose body of work she is evidently less than enthused with, though she feels obliged to compare him to Sartre. The essay rings of false piety.

She moves into an expansive and favorable essay on Antonin Artaud, the great playwright and artist of the avant-garde movement. Sontag reviews the developments of his great career within the context of moralistic philosophic aesthetics, liking him with Nietzsche, then Sade, then Breton.

Yet the most impressive essay in Under the Sign is titled `Fascinating Fascism,' and it is truly fascinating. In it, Sontag overviews the work of filmmaker, actress, and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist whose body of work includes the esteemed documentaries Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, the latter about the 1936 Olympic games. Sontag reviews Riefenstahl's book of photography on the Nuba tribe in Sudan, which is apparently breathtaking. Sontag concludes that Reifenstahl, despite her `de-Nazification' and renunciation of her political past is still enamored with a fascist ideal, valuing the masculine strength of the male Nuba and placing their bodies in the foreground, while the women remain vulnerable and tucked away in shadowy corners. The essay is highly provocative.

The title essay is about the great philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, whom she reviews favorably. This essay provides some interesting tidbits of information that Hannah Arendt neglects to include in her introduction, such as Benjamin's apparent hatred for Heidegger's philosophy.

Also included in this volume is an excellent and terse review of Roland Barthes, and the fine novelist Elias Canetti, whom she holds in great esteem.

4 people found this helpful

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Susan kills it, as usual

February 15, 2012

Format: Paperback

Sontag, as ever, manages to craft writings of remarkable intellectual range and depth on pretty much anything she focuses. Under the Sign of Saturn feels a bit darker than some of her other books I've read, in so far is a lot of the essays focus on (both directly and implicity) fascism and its broad appeal and continued resonance in the arts and culture of the post-war era. I think the best thing I can say about these is that even when you have no exposure to the works of people she writes about (I for one don't know the first thing about Antonin Artaud Elias Canetti or Hans Syberberg) she still manages to spin out so many dazzlingly smart observations that they are absolutely worth your time. Sontag makes you passionate about everything she's passionate about. And there seems to be very little that she isn't passionate about

Comment

November 20, 2004

Format: Paperback

This volume has been reread by me more than once. Sontag explains that her piece on Paul Goodman is being written in a small room in Paris. The author states she was not a friend of Goodman, although several of their worlds coincided with each other. She admired Goodman's work immensely. She describes his voice as cranky, egotistical, American. She finds him comparable, a unique voice, to D.H. Lawrence. Goodman wrote poetry, plays, novels, and social criticism. After the publication of GROWING UP ABSURD in 1960 Goodman was no longer an obscure writer. Sontag complains that he was often taken for granted, even by his admirers. She deems his amateurism identical with his genius.

Susan Sontag asserts that Antonin Artaud failed in his work and his life. His work consisted of a vast collection of fragments. Artaud described intellectual distress. He considered consciousness as process. A leading theme was the link between suffering and writing. All of Artaud's writing was in the first person. He welcomed Surrealism. Artaud's idea of revolution diverged from the Surrealists. He started in poetry. By 1926 in his search for the total art form, Artaud was doing theatrical work. Sontag holds that Artaud offers the greatest quantity of suffering in literature.

The author produces a devastating analysis of the pretensions of Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag's discussion of Alpine movie epics is engaging. Riefenstahl is identified with the Nazi era. Sontag contends that her pbotography book, THE LAST OF THE NUBA, completed thirty years after that era continued to exemplify Nazi ideology.

Walter Benjamin is the subject of the title essay. Benjamin found Saturnine elements in Baudelaire, Proust, Karl Kraus, and even Goethe. To him, subject to melancholy, solitutde appeared to be the fit state of man. Benjamin collected emblem books. His relations with others were complex, veiled. Benjamin felt an affinity to the baroque and the Surreal. He had a microscopic gaze. Benjamin was a wanderer and a collector. By miniaturizing things they became portable. Benjamin wrote that the melancholic permits himself the pleasure of allegory. His characteristic form was the essay.

The piece on Elias Canetti stresses the writer's acquisition of languages. German became the language of his mind. As a child he had spoken Ladino. He had a taste for fanciful blends of knowledge. Canetti was rather close to Freud in technique and interests, but not Freudian. Sontag describes CROWDS AND POWER as an eccentric book.

The essays in this volume are both serious and lively.

9 people found this helpful

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August 21, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

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