Notes on Sontag (Hardcover) ~ Phillip Lopate (Author) Cover Art

Notes on Sontag (Hardcover)

By: Phillip Lopate (Author)


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Review

"[A]n extraordinarily rewarding study....Lopate is somehow able to look at Sontag's work both intimately and also at a measured distance; to pick apart sentences and to chart the progress of a phrase or an idea through decades of development and change."

"Lopate lucidly addresses all that was most brilliant about this iconic figure and all that was most maddening."

Publisher's note

"Notes on Sontag" is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence to Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years.

Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

Annotation

As part of Princeton University Press's "Writers on Writers" series, novelist and essayist Philip Lopate explores the writing, life, and critical thought of the late Susan Sontag. Examining Sontag through a prismatic perspective, Lopate's essays range from the personal to the deeply philosophical, and show both his admiration and occasional unease concerning one of America's greatest cultural critic. No dusty academic tome, NOTES ON SONTAG is full of charm, vitality, insight, and probing assessment.



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