The Scandal of Susan Sontag
ISBN: 9780231520454
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Sontag Susan 1933–2004 -- Criticism and interpretation;

This volume of essays by a dozen contributors (most notably Wayne Koestenbaum) examines a number of key works and aspects of Sontag's career-nearly five decades worth of gender-bending and upsetting the social applecart. Like its subject, this assessment comes with the baggage of ultra-self-consciousness and a dash of self-importance. Why shouldn't it? It is an attempt at interpreting the author who, with much provocative fanfare, came to disown interpretation. Overall, this appreciation-edited by two associate professors of English (Ching at the University of Memphis, Wagner-Lawlor at Penn State)-yields new insights on a most complex sensibility. The contributors accomplish this with sophisticated admiration, usually with originality and, with the requisite doses of wit to deconstruct the chronicler of camp. Sontag's work and reputation are looked at from all angles: in popular culture (a cameo in Zelig), as a filmmaker herself, as playwright and director, as novelist, as mental and literal world traveler. What predominates amid the academic-speak is Sontag's understanding of the politics of experience. 9 photos. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Barbara Ching is an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture and the coeditor of Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy .

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is associate professor of women's studies and English at Penn State University. She is the author of A Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet .

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