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 Her
Life
Family and Educational Background
Susan
Sontag, the famous social commentator, essayist, novelist and human
right activist, was born to the Ronsenblatts in 1933. Jack
Ronsenblatt was a fur trader who spent most of his life running his
export business and traveling. Born in New York, Sontag as
well as her sister Judith was raised mostly by her grandparents and
aunts for her parents tended to their business in China. In
1938, Jack Ronsenblatt died of tuberculosis in China; after that,
Mildred decided to move to Tucson for the sake of Sontag's
health. When she began her teaching career, Sontag started
her schooling at six. Owing to her comprehensive reading from
the age of three, Sontag skipped two years at school. Mildred
remarried Captain Nathan when Sontag was twelve, and Sontag was hence
the last name she took from her stepfather.
At
the age of fifteen, Sontag entered University of California at
Berkeley, but stayed there for merely one year, and then she
transferred to the University of Chicago where she go her
B.A. It is said that she married Philip Rieff, a professor of
sociologist when she was seventeen years old after ten days they knew
each other. Sontag went with Rieff to Harvard and continued
her study. After gaining her M.A. in English and Philosophy,
she applied for the Ph.D. program at Harvard. She had David,
her first and only child, when she was a Ph.D. candidate in
1952. Though she later admitted that the marriage with Rieff
was fine, she divorced him after she returned to New York after her
study at Oxford and Paris. At the end of the 1950s, she
started to teach and write as an editor in New York.
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Her works and influence
As a writer
After
her divorce, she began her teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College
and the City College of New York. From 1960, she worked four
years as an instructor at Columbia University, and she had published 26
essays from 1962 to 1965. At the age of 30, her first novel, The
Benefactor, came out. The novel was well-received
and it not only drew positive comments but was popular in the book
market. After the novel, she became a writer-in-residence at
Rutgers University. Her essay “Notes on Camp” appeared in
1964 and aroused extensive discussion on the topic of
aesthetic. The same essay also appeared in later collection
of essays, Against Interpretation and Other Essays,
in which she has justified the so-called lowbrow culture and proposed a
rejection of interpretation. She generated the idea of
“transparency” that was to take a work of art as “a thing” with a close
look and experience the style and content without comments.
Because of this regarding a form of art as a thing itself, not as a
text, nor a commentary, Sontag asked for the viewer to return the work
without judgmental analysis. After Against
Interpretation, she worked on essays exploring all sorts of
topics such as cinema, photography and music. In the 1960s,
she published her second novel Death Kit, another
collection of essays The Style of Radical Will(1969),
and Trip to Hanoi(1968). In the 1970s,
she expanded her study further on photography and published On
Photography(1977); her work Illness as Metaphor
(1978)came along with her suffering during the cancer treatment, and
the collection of short stories I, Etcetera
(1978) at the end of the 1970s. Following the 1970s, besides Under
the Sign of Saturn, her third collection of essays, she
extended her reflection of illness to the so-called plague of the
century – AIDS, and hence finished writing AIDS and Its
Metaphors in 1988. Her novels The
Western Half and The Volcano Lover
came at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s respectively, and then In
America in 1999, came with the aura of the National Book
Award in the Millennium. Another collection of essays Where
the Stress Falls, however, was criticized and attacked by
Williwm Deresiwicz on her position as America's leading
intellectual. The critique was totally different from what
she has received in 1982 from Stanley Aronowitz, who considered her to
be the feminist movement leading character and a guru figure.
Despite the harsh criticism she received in 2001, Regarding
the Pain of Others has been released lately in 2003 with
her imagery of war.
As
a screenplay writer and a director
Sontag's
first film Duet for Cannibals appeared in 1969 in
New York Film Festival. She not merely wrote screenplays, but
created three more films after that; they are Brother Carl
(1971), Promised Lands (1974), and Ungruided
Tour (1983). Both Alice in Bed and
Lady from the Sea have been popular plays
that are translated into many languages and performed in numerous
countries all over the world. It is because of her effort on
cinema and plays that had won her a position on the jury of the New
York Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival back in late 1960s and
early 1970s. Recently, Sontag has directed Beckett's Waiting
for Godot in 1993 in Sarajevo, where she was made an
honorary citizen.
Awards
and influence
As a
writer whose productions of the novels, essays, screenplays and the
plays have been translated into more than twenty-five languages all
over the world, Sontag has won the George Polk Memorial Award in 1964,
the American Academy Ingram Merrill Foundation Award (1976), National
Book Critics Circle Award (1977) for her On Photography,
Arts and Letters award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
(1976), Academy of Sciences and Literature Award in Germany (1979), a
five-year Fellowship of the MacArthur Foundation from 1990, the
Malaparte Prize in Italy (1992), the National Book Award for In
America in 2000, and the 2001 Jerusalem Prize. But
Sontag's influence on America is never limited at the academic
realm. Her efforts on human right as a member of writer,
organizer and later the president of PEN have made her a world-known
leader when it comes to the credit of rescuing the imprisoned and
persecuted writers and intellectuals.
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Reference
Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale
Group, 2000.
http://www.susansontag.com/biography.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fu/sontag.htm
http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sontag.html
The New Encyclopædia
Britannica. 15th
Edition.
Sayre, Sohnya. Susan Songtag: The
Elegic Modernist. London: Routledge, 1990.
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