Notes on Sontag

Phillip Lopate

Princeton University Press, Mar 9, 2009 - Literary Collections - 256 pages

Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years.

Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

Contents

• INTRODUCTION: 1
• Against Interpretation: 23
• Early Memories of Sontag: 37
• Politics and Personae: 47
• Bêtes Noires: 66
• Crisis as StartingPoint: 79
• Are the Arts Progressive?: 83
• The Stylistics of Demystification: 88
• The Aphoristic Essay: 93
• The Film Essays: 99
• My Favorite Book of Hers: 111
• Readers Feeling Stupid: 129
• The Benefactor: 135
• Humor and Seriousness: 141
• Death Kit: 143
• Shallow America: 149
• The Volcano Lover: 159
• Performance Character and Theatre: 166
• The Essay Form Transgression and Innovation: 171
• Dont Get Personal: 174
• Later Memories of Sontag: 184
• Writings on Photography: 202
• More on Politics: 217
• On 911 and Television: 223
• Greatness besieged: 227
• Illness and Death: 233
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 247

About the author

Phillip Lopate is the author of many books, including the essay collections Getting Personal (Basic), Against Joie de Vivre (Simon & Schuster), Portrait of My Body (Doubleday), and Bachelorhood (Little, Brown), as well as the anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday). Among his other books is Waterfront: A Walk around Manhattan (Crown). He teaches writing at Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Notes on Sontag; Volume 2 of Writers on Writers
• Author: Phillip Lopate
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2009
• ISBN: 1400829879, 9781400829873
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Literary Criticism / American / General; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Women Authors