Susan Sontag

Susan Sontags «Tekster om film» inneholder klassiske, dyptpløyende tekster om europeiske regissører som Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson og Ingmar Bergman, men også kulturkritiske diskusjoner av filmkultur, relasjonen mellom filmisk og teatral estetikk, og mediets og kinoens stilling i det 21. århundret. «Hvis filmen skal gjenoppstå, kan det bare være hvis en ny type kjærlighet til film blir født, en cine-love.» - Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (1933-2004) var en amerikansk kulturkritiker, essayist og romanforfatter. Bokserien Existenz Film presenterer filosofiske og litterære tekster som skal bidra til diskusjonen om film som medium og løfte filmen inn i den større samtalen om kultur. «Tekster om film» er første bok i serien.

Å betrakte andres lidelse er et alderdomsverk, utgitt året før Susan Sontag (1933-2004) døde. Som Virginia Woolf vendte den amerikanske kritikeren seg sent i livet mot krigsfotografiet. Essayet løper som en dialog med Woolfs refleksjon over fotografier fra den spanske borgerkrigen, der Sontags essayistiske behandling av krigsfotografiets historie er aktualisert av krigen på Balkan på 1990-tallet. Dette er et moralsk skrift som med stor konsekvens betoner det historiske, konkrete, lokale og individuelle mot det abstrakte og generelle i krigsfotografiets fremstilling av lidelse. Sontag går også i rette med egne holdninger i klassikeren Om fotografi fra 1977 (Pax artes, 2004). Kaja Schjerven Mollerin har skrevet etterordet til den norske oversettelsen.

A collection of short fiction from Susan Sontag, the National Book Award-winning author of In America and Against Interpretation, and the renowned essayist praised as "one of our very few brand-name intellectuals" (The Yale Review). An invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power, Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. Ranging from allegory to parable to autobiography, these stories show Sontag wrestling with problems beyond the essayistic form, her more customary mode. Here, she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, and lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag's work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art--made more urgent by the passage of years--await a new generation of readers.

Un l cido ensayo sobre la representaci n documental e iconogr fica del dolor. Veinticinco a os despu s de Sobre la fotograf a, Susan Sontag regres al estudio de la representaci n visual de la guerra y la violencia. C mo nos afecta el espect culo del sufrimiento ajeno? Nos hemos acostumbrado a la crueldad? Para ello, la autora examina la serie de Goya Los desastres de la guerra, las fotograf as de la guerra civil estadounidense y de los campos de concentraci n nazis, y las horribles im genes contempor neas de Bosnia, Sierra Leona, Ruanda, Israel y Palestina, as como de la ciudad de Nueva York el 11 de septiembre de 2001. En Ante el dolor de los dem s, Susan Sontag aporta una interesante reflexi n sobre c mo la guerra se lleva a cabo (y se entiende) en nuestros d as. ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONTwenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today. How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

Min film fødes først i mit hoved, dør pa° papiret, genoplives af de levende personer og de virkelige objekter, som jeg bruger, og som dør pa° filmstrimlen, men som, arrangeret i en særlig orden og projiceret pa° lærredet, vækkes til live igen som blomster i vand. * Model. Hans permanens: altid den samme ma°de at være anderledes pa°. * Grav dybt i din sansning. Se hvad der er pa° indersiden. Analyser den ikke med ord. Oversæt den til søsterbilleder, til ækvivalente lyde. Desto klarere den er, desto tydeligere viser din stil sig. (Stil: alt hvad der ikke er teknik.)

'Magnificent... Her famous seriousness pervades throughout... What's striking is the astonishing scope, potential and possibility Sontag saw in short fiction' Financial TimesThe complete collected short stories of Susan Sontag, one of the most brilliant and influential writers of the twentieth centurySusan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears. Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements.'Sontag is one of the most influential critics of her generation' New York Review of Books

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation, as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.'These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

An unprecedented collection of the controversial later writings of the greatest and most provocative critic of our time. Susan Sontag was the most influential critic of her time. This second volume in Library of America's definitive Sontag edition gathers all the collected essays and speeches from her last quarter-century, brilliant works whose subjects, from the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the Iraq war, and the perverse allure of Fascism to painting, dance, music, film, and scintillating literary portraits of such writers as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Brodsky, W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Robert Walser, bear enduring witness to passionate curiosity and expansive intellect. She brings to every subject an unwavering focus and intensity, and a deep commitment to "extending our sense of what a human life can be," as she said on accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2000. An account of her 1993 residence in war-torn Sarajevo to stage a production of Waiting for Godot becomes a meditation on the meaning of culture: "Culture, serious culture, is an expression of human dignity-which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost." AIDS and Its Metaphors marks a further development of the central ideas of her classic Illness as Metaphor, while Regarding the Pain of Others explores eloquently the troubling moral issues surrounding photographic depictions of violence, cruelty, and atrocity. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A Financial Times Best Book of 2012 From the turbulent years of her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her time making films in Sweden and up to the eve of the 1980 election, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh documents the evolution of an extraordinary mind. The 1966 publication of Against Interpretation propelled Susan Sontag from the periphery of New York City's artistic and intellectual milieu into the international spotlight, solidifying her place as a dominant force in the world of ideas. These entries are an invaluable record of the inner workings of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century.

'The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation- however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.'Brazen, brilliant and deeply searing, Sontag's diaries wrestle with the profound - exploring ideas and subjects as far-reaching as writing, war, desire and consciousness. From the graphic destruction of war-torn Vietnam to her tumultuous romantic affairs, in the second volume of her diaries, Sontag is profoundly candid and insightful. This instalment charts the years when Sontag wrote the majority of her renowned essays, including the ground-breaking Against Interpretation in 1966. Riveting and enlightening, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh illuminates the mind of one of the twentieth century's most significant intellectuals. 'Her diary entries combine her interests with bright, aphoristic turns of phrase.... These diaries are a reminder of the value of the work that made her great, and also mysterious . . . ' The Economist'It is a rare pleasure to read, in her diary, discoveries being made in real time. She applies her mind to itself with enthusiasm' The Guardian 'In its fragmentation and incoherence and passion, its combination of the erudite and the everyday, it is more true to life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel or careful biography. It may well be that Sontag's diaries, like Virginia Woolf's (which she knew and admired) will come to be seen as just as brilliant and important as anything she wrote.' The Telegraph

First published in 1967, Death Kit is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, Susan Sontag's second novel offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience. The novel is a narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to commit suicide. The haphazard events of his life, including killing a railway worker and falling in love with a blind girl, are brought to us through the lens of Diddy's own mind. We follow him through his journey to justify his actions and exorcise his inner demons, but we can see what is happening to Diddy only from inside his head, in the present, and the balance of his mind does not always bear close scrutiny.

"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself." The first of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, Reborn (1947-1963) reveals one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century, fully engaged in the act of self-invention. Beginning with a voracious and prodigious fourteen-year-old, Reborn ends as Sontag, age thirty, is finally living in New York as a published writer.

'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself'Intimate, vulnerable and unsparing, Reborn bears witness to the evolution of Susan Sontag. With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective, Sontag's diaries reveal the inner workings of her mind, her insecurities and her passions. This compelling account of the evolution of America's greatest post-war intellectual allows us to behold the moral and political awakening of the artist and critic.'An exceptionally vivid, and often moving, account of a young woman's painful journey towards acceptance of her own nature' Sunday Telegraph'Moving on several levels . . . thrilling . . . fascinating . . . often reads like a brilliant postmodern bildungsroman' New York Magazine'One can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging' Guardian