What does /lit/ think about Sontag?

>>7974928
I try not to

>>7974928

Read her bio. Seems like turboleft lesbians epic heroine.

>>7974928
She's the one who said we should destroy all of Mozart, Bach, da Vinci etc. because "White People™" are so evil, right?

id sont her tag

(also on photography was great)

>>7974928
I kind of like her. I might not be a fan of her politics, but some of her analyses (particularly of the aestheticization of politics in fascism) are interesting and insightful.

>>7974990
close
she said in spite of mozart, bach, da vinci, etc (or perhaps, because of), white people have historically been the cancer of the world
she's not wrong either, in an imperialist sense

anyway, i'm a fan of sontag, though i've only read her most well-known work (ones that come immediately to mind are on photography, regarding the pain of others, and against interpretation)

>>7974928
Truly and honestly, I REALLY don't like her ideas. I think all of the new hype around her has something to do with Better Than Food's review. I respect the taste of that channel, but I think he's bought in to Sontag's rhetoric a little too easily.

E.G.:

>"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."

Here, in her essay "Against Interpretation," Sontag completely misses the point of literary criticism and interpretive literary theory. She seems to think that interpretation is somehow an act of modernizing the past, revisiting old works for the sake of keeping them alive, and squeezing meaning out of them for the sake of doing it.

She fails to consider two big things.
1. How, then, can scholars utilize hermeneutics on a work of art, and still arive at an interpretation? Certainly this is Biblical studies and Art History in its entirety.
2. Isn't a work of art utilized by others, through interpretations, to make larger political, social, or scholarly claims? If all scholars thought like Sontag, we wouldn't have Freud's Oedipal discourse, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, or most of Joyce's Ulysses. It's ridiculous to assume that interpretation cannot be utilized as a source material from which to create one's own theories.

For the most part, Sontag suffers greatly from her simple denial of the useful developments of modern theory. Her essays on specific arts (Film and Photography mostly) are pretty great. But when she tries to make blanket statements, she fails greatly.

>>7975574
By treating all whites as a monolith, she is exhibiting her own mediocre colonial whiteness

>>7975714
By treating all whites as a monolith, she is exhibiting he own ability to be a giant pussy.

i've read essays by her here and then. she's probably the only worthwhile american literary critic, mainly because she's the least american one.
her politics are suspect. white people are garbage and cancer (see this board); don't give a shit about them but her pet causes in the balkans.

I've read a bunch of her essays, they seemed pretty good

>>7974928
/pol/ is always right

>>7974928
she said one of my favorite movies was garbage so i dont like her :)

>>7974928
>I was regularly exhausted by her limitless capacity for admiring things. She was perpetually "moved" by this Japanese film director, "exalted" by that lesser-known Janáček opera, "besotted" by the contortions of some ballerina. When the pleasure of her company segued into pedantry, I usually glazed over. I could be pedantic too, but... I once told her bluntly that this need to be exalted every minute of the day was terribly draining for people who had to pretend to be exalted along with her. Susan took, as was her wont, umbrage. It wasn't her fault if people were lazy and unadventurous, didn't care to eat a hundred-year-old egg or plod through a thousand-page Hungarian novel, though for the life of her she didn't understand why people were so lazy, though no doubt it had to do with television coarsening their sensitivities.

>>7975786

>her politics are suspect.

To say the least, but I'm a fan of Louis-Ferdinand Celine and others who I don't politically agree with so I think it'd be a tad hypocritical of me to write her off on those terms.