Word: essay
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...essays in her new collection display a wide interest in literature, film, dance, photography, criticism and sometimes politics (though her 1999 essay on Kosovo is noticeably absent). The literary essays tend to deal with established but mildly obscure European litterateurs (Danilo Kis, Witold Gombrowicz, W.G. Sebald, Andrzej Zagajewski). The rest of the pieces stick to art films, opera and dance. Her inimitably terse prose is recognizable from her previous criticism, particularly her tendency to issue elliptical, almost aphoristic judgments at an essay’s end. In addition, a few creative pieces—one an accompaniment for a Jasper...
...newest essay collection, Where the Stress Falls, Sontag sounds awfully unfazed by this steady depletion of the ranks of “serious’’ critics—a depletion she has observed from a high and uncompromised vantage point. Since the early sixties she has been a major figure among the New York intelligentsia (“the Dark Lady of American letters,’’ said Norman Podhoretz), and she has with remarkable energy written novels, screenplays, drama and essays, the last two decades of which are collected here. In none...
...cannot quarrel with most of Sontag’s aesthetic judgments—they are, with no obvious exceptions, level-headed essays of appreciation for roundly-lauded artists—but her unremitting earnestness ultimately make her essays a chore to read. One wonders not just at Sontag’s artistic voracity, but at her boneheaded inability to crack wise now and then, or to liven her discussion with even the slightest dip into the troughs of low culture. Sontag has long been mocked and feared for her imposing figure, and nowhere do we see the intensity...
...herself had warned against. In “Against Interpretation’’ (collected in a book of the same name), Sontag railed against the type of writing about literature, film and painting that dissects artwork and leaves it dead on the examination table. She ended the essay with a stand alone line, unrivaled by other criticism of the era for its pith and spirit: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics...
Finally, someone sees the forest as well as the trees. Morrow's essay is the most incisive statement on the tragedy I have read. Anyone hoping that some good will come of this insane act by bringing people together for a common cause is as misguided as those who committed this barbarism. There is no shame in feeling outrage, and certainly nothing wrong with taking all necessary means to correct an injustice--especially one inflicted on those who are truly innocent. CLIVE L. (CHIP) PEDERSEN Huntington Beach, Calif...