苏珊·桑塔格，美国著名作家，思想家。1933年生于美国纽约。2004.12.27.去世。桑塔格文风激越、气质超迈，特立独行，她是当前美国声名卓著的“新知识分子”，和西蒙·波伏娃、汉娜·阿伦特被并称为西方当代最重要的女知识分子，也是当代批判型独立知识分子的精神典范。著有《反对释义》、《重点所在》、《疾病的隐喻》、《论摄影》，以及大量的小说和剧本。
Susan Sontag, the internationally renowned novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences - and one of the most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died today in New York. She was 71 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, the critical study “Illness as Metaphor“ (1978).
A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960’s, Ms. Sontag was the author of four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories, and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades, her work occupied a place of prominence in the contemporary canon, discussed in such diverse forums as graduate seminars, the pages of popular magazines and the Hollywood movie “Bull Durham.“
Ms. Sontag’s best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels “Death Kit“ (1967), “The Volcano Lover“ (1992) and “In America“ (2000); the essay collections “Against Interpretation“ (1966), “Styles of Radical Will“ (1969) and “Under the Sign of Saturn“ (1982); the critical studies “On Photography“ (1977) and “AIDS and Its Metaphors“ (1989); and the short-story collection “I, Etcetera“ (1978).
Her most recent book, published last year, was “Regarding the Pain of Others,“ a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. One of her last published essays, “Regarding the Torture of Others,“ written in response to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison, appeared in The New York Times Magazine of May 23, 2004.
Ms. Sontag’s writing marked a radical break with traditional postwar criticism. She advocated a sensualist approach to the study of art, championed aesthetic form over content and - most subversive - gleefully blurred the boundaries between high and low culture. Learned, thoughtful, deeply cerebral, often provocative, her work repeatedly explored the transcendent experience of making, and looking at, contemporary art, with its jagged edges and attendant themes of alienation and despair. She was concerned throughout her career with sensation, in both meanings of the word.
“What Susan did was, she dealt as a literary and philosophical intellectual with the deep problems of human life in our times,“ Arthur Danto, the Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University and an art critic for The Nation, said in a telephone interview today. “She was never a dispassionate or disinterested writer. She always used her own experience as a way of giving meaning to issues that had meaning for everybody.“
Unlike most serious intellectuals, Ms. Sontag was also a popular celebrity, partly because of her striking, telegenic appearance, partly because of her outspoken, at times inflammatory, public statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur “genius“ grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazine; and pose for an Absolut Vodka ad. Over the decades, her image - strong features, wide mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned in later years by a sweeping streak of white - became an instantly recognizable artifact of 20th-century popular culture.
Trained in literature and philosophy, Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her, a radical stance at the time.
