Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T03:39:13.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Regarding Susan Sontag

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Nancy K. Miller
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“Were i a writer, and dead.” that phrase from the preface to roland barthes's 1971 sade fourier loyola embodies a slightly perverse expression of posthumous longing from the critic who composed “The Death of the Author” a few years earlier. Barthes goes on to say how much he would like it if “through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer,” his life were “to reduce itself to a few details,” to, since he loved neologisms, a handful of “biographemes” (9). These biographical details of taste and tone would somehow transport the writer into space, scatter, touch another body—that body too would be destined to dispersal. The result would be not a whole life but a life full of holes, the way Marcel Proust, Barthes thought, wrote his.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 3 , May 2005 , pp. 828 - 833
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Sade Fourier Loyola. Trans. Miller, Richard. New York: Hill, 1976.Google Scholar
Bishop, Eliabeth. “Questions of Travel.” The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, 1983. 93–94.Google Scholar
Compagnon, Antoine, ed. Pretexte: Roland Barthes. Col-loque de Cerisy. Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1978.Google Scholar
Hardwick, Elizabeth. “The Subjection of Women.” A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society. New York: Farrar, 1962. 167–82.Google Scholar
Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Speaking of Susan Sontag.” New York Times 27 Aug. 1967: BR2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.Google Scholar
Marcus, Jane. Letter. New Yorker 13 Jan. 2003: 7.Google Scholar
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Frame, Donald M. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Nelson, Deborah. Rev. of Where the Stress Falls, by Susan Sontag. Women's Review of Books Oct. 2001: 4–5.Google Scholar
Prosser, Jay. Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005.Google Scholar
Rollyson, Carl, and Paddock, Lisa. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. New York: Norton, 2000.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel.” Against Interpretation. New York: Anchor, 1986. 100–14.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “A Photograph Is Not an Opinion, or Is It?” Sontag, Where the Stress 238–51.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others: Notes on What Has Been Done—and Why—to Prisoners, by Americans.” New York Times Magazine 23 May 2004: 24+.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Simone Weil.” Against Interpretation. New York: Anchor, 1986. 49–51.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “The Third World of Women.” Partisan Review 40 (1973): 180–206.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. Where the Stress Falls. New York: Picador, 2002.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Writing Itself.” A Susan Sontag Reader. Ed. Hardwick, Elizabeth. New York: Farrar, 1982. 425–46.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan, and Rich, Adrienne. “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books 20 Mar. 1975: 30–31.Google Scholar