Susan Sontag: Mind As Passion

Susan Sontag has been a major figure in American intellectual life for over thirty years. She has consistently broken fresh ground in cultural analysis and provocatively engaged a wide range of socio-political issues. This study provides a critical introduction to her essays and fiction, illustrating how her aesthetic and political concerns are shaped by her role as a public intellectual within the New York tradition. Liam Kennedy presents Sontag as a modernist "writer-intellectual" who has produced a distinctive critical perspective on such diverse subjects as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography, AIDS and revolution. The book provides a detailed critical analysis of the poetics and politics of Sontag's intellectual generalism. She is presented as a singular interpreter and exponent of high modernist aesthetics who has built a major body of textual work around her strong "sense of an ending", a perspective on late modernist culture which unites her diverse interests and spans her essays and fiction.