Susan Sontag

At 71 years old, Susan Sontag physical status not available right now. We will update Susan Sontag's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Career

While working on her stories, Sontag taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and City University of New York and the Philosophy of Religion with Jacob Taubes, Susan Taubes, Theodor Gaster, and Hans Jonas, in the Religion Department at Columbia University from 1960 to 1964. She held a writing fellowship at Rutgers University for 1964 to 1965 before ending her relationship with academia in favor of full-time freelance writing.: 56–57

At age 30, she published an experimental novel called The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on November 24, 1986 in The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a significant text on the AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist with The Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel In America (2000). The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice:

She wrote and directed four films and also wrote several plays, the most successful of which were Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea.

It was through her essays that Sontag gained early fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art and expanded the dichotomy concept of form and art in every medium. She elevated camp to the status of recognition with her widely read 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp,'" which accepted art as including common, absurd and burlesque themes.

In 1977, Sontag published the series of essays On Photography. These essays are an exploration of photographs as a collection of the world, mainly by travelers or tourists, and the way we experience it. In the essays, she outlined her theory of taking pictures as you travel:

Sontag writes that the convenience of modern photography has created an overabundance of visual material, and "just about everything has been photographed.": 3  This has altered our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view or should view. "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe" and has changed our "viewing ethics.": 3  Photographs have increased our access to knowledge and experiences of history and faraway places, but the images may replace direct experience and limit reality.: 10–24  She also states that photography desensitizes its audience to horrific human experiences, and children are exposed to experiences before they are ready for them.: 20

Sontag continued to theorize about the role of photography in real life in her essay "Looking at War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death," which appeared in the December 9, 2002 issue of The New Yorker. There she concludes that the problem of our reliance on images and especially photographic images is not that "people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs ... that the photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture" (p. 94).

She became a role-model for many feminists and aspiring female writers during the 1960s and 1970s.

Source

Awards and honors

• 1976: Arts and Letters Award in Literature
• 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography
• 1979: Beca member of the American Arts
• 1990: MacArthur Fellowship
• 1992: Malaparte Prize, Italy
• 1999: Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, France
• 2000: National Book Award for In America
• 2001: Jerusalem Prize, awarded every two years to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society.
• 2002: George Polk Award, for Cultural Criticism for "Looking at War," in The New Yorker
• 2003: Honorary Doctorate of Tübingen University
• 2003: Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels during the Frankfurt Book Fair
• 2003: Prince of Asturias Award on Literature.
• 2004: Two days after her death, Muhidin Hamamdzic, the mayor of Sarajevo announced the city would name a street after her, calling her an "author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia." Theatre Square outside the National Theatre was promptly proposed to be renamed Susan Sontag Theatre Square. It took 5 years, however, for that tribute to become official. On January 13, 2010, the city of Sarajevo posted a plate with a new street name for Theater Square: Theater Square of Susan Sontag.