sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
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- Jan 10, 2003
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(12-28) 14:01 PST NEW YORK (AP) --
Susan Sontag, a leading intellectual and activist of the past half century who introduced the concept of "camp" to mainstream culture and also influenced the way many thought about art, illness and photography, died Tuesday. She was 71.
Sontag died at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, said Esther Carver, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Her son, David Rieff, said the cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, one of the deadliest forms of leukemia.
Sontag had suffered off and on from cancer since the 1970s.
"I knew Susan since 1962 and I know how much she suffered and how brave she was facing her illness," fellow author Carlos Fuentes told The Associated Press in Mexico City.
Tall and commanding, her very presence suggested grand, passionate drama: eyes the richest brown; thick, black hair accented by a bolt of white; the voice deep and assured; her expression a severe stare or a wry smile, as if amused by a joke only she could tell.
She wrote a best-selling historical novel, "The Volcano Lover," and in 2000 won the National Book Award for the historical novel "In America." But her greatest literary impact was as an essayist.
Her 1964 piece, "Notes on Camp," which established her as a major new writer, popularized the "so bad it's good" attitude toward popular culture, applicable to everything from "Swan Lake" to feather boas. In "Against Interpretation," this most analytical of writers worried that critical analysis interfered with art's "incantatory, magical" power.
She also wrote such influential works as "Illness as Metaphor," in which she examined how disease had been alternately romanticized and demonized, and "On Photography," in which she argued pictures sometimes distance viewers from the subject matter. "On Photography" received a National Book Critics Circle award in 1978. "Regarding the Pain of Others," a partial refutation of "On Photography," was an NBCC finalist in 2004.
Sontag was deeply involved in politics and campaigned relentlessly for human rights. From 1987-89, she served as president of the American chapter of the writers organization PEN. When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie's death because of the alleged blasphemy of Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," Sontag helped lead protests in the literary community.
"She was a true friend in need," Rushdie said in a statement Tuesday. "Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles."
Fuentes praised Sontag's "devotion to literature, her courage, which she demonstrated once and again in political matters -- Vietnam and Sarajevo -- in the policies of the Bush administration, in her books on AIDS, on illness as a metaphor."
The daughter of a fur trader, Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933. She spent her early years in Tucson, Ariz., and Los Angeles. Her mother was an alcoholic; her father died when she was 5. Her mother later married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag.
Susan Sontag skipped three grades and graduated from high school at 15. She met her husband, Philip Rieff, a social psychologist and historian, at the University of Chicago. Their son, David, was born in 1952; they divorced by the mid-1960s.
Sontag also wrote and directed the films "Duet for Cannibals," "Brother Carl" and "Promised Lands" and wrote the play "Alice in Bed." Sontag appeared as herself in Woody Allen's mock documentary, "Zelig."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2004/12/28/obituary1250EST0527.DTL
Susan Sontag, a leading intellectual and activist of the past half century who introduced the concept of "camp" to mainstream culture and also influenced the way many thought about art, illness and photography, died Tuesday. She was 71.
Sontag died at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, said Esther Carver, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Her son, David Rieff, said the cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, one of the deadliest forms of leukemia.
Sontag had suffered off and on from cancer since the 1970s.
"I knew Susan since 1962 and I know how much she suffered and how brave she was facing her illness," fellow author Carlos Fuentes told The Associated Press in Mexico City.
Tall and commanding, her very presence suggested grand, passionate drama: eyes the richest brown; thick, black hair accented by a bolt of white; the voice deep and assured; her expression a severe stare or a wry smile, as if amused by a joke only she could tell.
She wrote a best-selling historical novel, "The Volcano Lover," and in 2000 won the National Book Award for the historical novel "In America." But her greatest literary impact was as an essayist.
Her 1964 piece, "Notes on Camp," which established her as a major new writer, popularized the "so bad it's good" attitude toward popular culture, applicable to everything from "Swan Lake" to feather boas. In "Against Interpretation," this most analytical of writers worried that critical analysis interfered with art's "incantatory, magical" power.
She also wrote such influential works as "Illness as Metaphor," in which she examined how disease had been alternately romanticized and demonized, and "On Photography," in which she argued pictures sometimes distance viewers from the subject matter. "On Photography" received a National Book Critics Circle award in 1978. "Regarding the Pain of Others," a partial refutation of "On Photography," was an NBCC finalist in 2004.
Sontag was deeply involved in politics and campaigned relentlessly for human rights. From 1987-89, she served as president of the American chapter of the writers organization PEN. When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie's death because of the alleged blasphemy of Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," Sontag helped lead protests in the literary community.
"She was a true friend in need," Rushdie said in a statement Tuesday. "Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles."
Fuentes praised Sontag's "devotion to literature, her courage, which she demonstrated once and again in political matters -- Vietnam and Sarajevo -- in the policies of the Bush administration, in her books on AIDS, on illness as a metaphor."
The daughter of a fur trader, Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933. She spent her early years in Tucson, Ariz., and Los Angeles. Her mother was an alcoholic; her father died when she was 5. Her mother later married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag.
Susan Sontag skipped three grades and graduated from high school at 15. She met her husband, Philip Rieff, a social psychologist and historian, at the University of Chicago. Their son, David, was born in 1952; they divorced by the mid-1960s.
Sontag also wrote and directed the films "Duet for Cannibals," "Brother Carl" and "Promised Lands" and wrote the play "Alice in Bed." Sontag appeared as herself in Woody Allen's mock documentary, "Zelig."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2004/12/28/obituary1250EST0527.DTL
