What is Susan Sontag's legacy to women intellectuals?
If "gayness" isn't what propels intellectuals, what will be the cause?
vol. 1 issue 30
Greetings,
For my premium subscribers, I have a question: who is your beacon of female intellectualism?
If it’s Susan Sontag, here is an audio clip of about a five minute exchange I had with her biographer, Benjamin Moser, this week during a discussion he gave about his new book, Sontag. The venue was the Connecticut Ave. Politics and Prose bookstore here in DC. The event was moderated by Elizabeth Breunig from the Washington Post opinion page.
Sontag is perhaps best remembered by the general public for her work Illness as Metaphor, and for her sharp words for Americans in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, written in The New Yorker. My particular interest in her has always been her views on cancer, as elucidated in Illness as Metaphor, which most people did not realize she had written when she was actually receiving treatment for breast cancer.
Her argument was: metaphor romanticizes disease, blaming the patient for not being “enough” of something — spiritual, tough, forebea…
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