Styles of Radical Will

by Susan Sontag

Overview

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312420215
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/06/2002
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for criticism, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, and most recently, Where the Stress Falls. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.

Table of Contents

I.

The Aesthetics of Silence
The Pornographic Imagination
"Thinking Against Oneself": Reflections on Cioran

II.

Theatre and Film
Bergman's Persona
Godard

III.

What's Happening in America (1966)
Trip to Hanoi

Editorial Reviews

Susan Sontag's essays are great interpretations and even fulfillments of what is really going on.” —Carlos Fuentes

“[Susan Sontag] is one of the most interesting and valuable critics we possess, a writer from whom it's continually possible to learn.” —Richard Gilman, The New Republic

“She has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience.” —Time magazine

“Miss Sontag emerges from Styles of Radical Will . . . as an open and vulnerable intellect, a consciousness in process of transformation . . . Her first essay, 'The Aesthetics of Silence' is a brilliant and important account of Western tradition of artistic revolt against language, against thinking, against consciousness.” —Robert Sklar, The Nation

“It should be remembered that Miss Sontag has now written four of the most valuable intellectual documents of the past ten years: 'Against Interpretation,' 'Notes on Camp,' The Aesthetics of Silence,' and 'Trip to Hanoi.' In the world in which she's chosen to live, she continues to be the best there is.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher