Word: sontag
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book is filled with descriptions of European travel, war casualties and musings on the psychology of republican revolutionaries. The writing is pure Sontag--strong, reflective, and intellectual. Unfortunately, it shows little sign of the ingenuity of her earlier work. Indeed, Sontag seems eager to divorce herself from the essays which made her so famous...
...want to repudiate the earlier work, but it is totally remote to me," Sontag insists. She has steadfastly become a high modernest in a post-modernist world. "I feel this was the book I was born to write. And I wish it were my first book. "I feel this was the book I was born to write. And I wish it were my first book... I'd much rather write this kind of book than anything else I've written...
...novel is good, but it's not Sontag at her best. Though she shuns it, the temptation to contrast Volcano Lover with her earlier work is irresistible. Sontag--the same woman who was influenced by the novels and plays of Batille and Artaud and the philosophy of Sartre, Camus, Lukacs, Barthes and Canetti--has turned her back on the present by ignoring the history of her work...
Like Rachmaninov, the stubborn composer who used 19th-century models for his music, Sontag is a willful anachronism and has never been accepted by critics and academics. Unlike Rachmaninov, however, it is doubtful that Sontag's Volcano Lover Work will be embraced by the general public. Now the novelty, the taboo topics have vanished from Sontag's art; a shadow of the pioneer of the '60s has settled into his book...
...Sontag of the 60's was an observer and analyst of the avant-garde, a cultural critic that showed us ourselves. She always learned toward the esoteric. Who would have guessed a generation of trendy academics would make the formerly well-known story of Sir William Hamilton obscure...