Word: moralizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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INVENTING THE MORAL ITINERARY
...presidential campaign is still a fascinating trajectory, over time and vast landscape. In the very American way, it is a moral itinerary, an idea proceeding across both biographies and territories...
...taking seriously a taste that valued aesthetics over morality, Sontag offended American critics trained to sort through works of art for their moral messages. So be it -- they were the ones she had in mind when, in another famous essay, she declared herself "against interpretation." In her view, interpretation had become a means to reduce unruly art and literature to its manageable "content," a way of rendering art's raw power more digestible. She wanted more attention paid to art's sensual capabilities, to the way it works upon consciousness through the imprint of its form and surfaces...
...pursuing experimental technique, as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein had done. In all, the effect of her complaints was electric, a bracing shot at some of the more complacent positions in American thought. But her critics accused her of trendiness, of bowing to Europe, of hostility to art's moral purposes. They charged that she equated art with style and made thought subordinate to sensuality...
...world that I am is anti-intellectual. Even in the most high-spirited, somewhat simplifying formulations in some of those essays -- after all, I was in my 20s and full of combative spirit -- I was defending a much more serious approach." She did not declare that art has no moral purpose, she sighs. Her point was merely that art and morality are not the same thing, that their interactions are complex. As for equating high and popular culture, she explains, "I made a few jolly references to things in popular culture that I enjoyed. I said, for instance, one could...