Synopses & Reviews
This third essay collection by America's leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.
Review
“In this collection, Sontag masters all she chooses to survey. She is a noble appreciator. Integrity, wholeness, large-sighted vision are intrinsic to Sontags care for the intellectual life....
Under the Sign of Saturn includes two long articles that belong together: the famed, polemical, whipping of Leni Riefenstahls laundered reputation and camp cult of fascist art, and her stunning analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberbergs
Hitler, a Film from Germany.... After this feast, I am eager for her thoughts on anything.”—
Chicago Sun-Times“A self-described ‘besotted aesthete and ‘obsessed moralist, Sontag, more than most writers of her generation, views the everyday business of thinking and feeling as dialectical aspects of one another. Refining that sensibility while attending to the more provocative issues of the day, Sontag has created a body of work of exemplary merit.” —The Boston Globe
“No one has written more passionately about Antonin Artaud....Nor has anyone before Sontag taken the pains to demolish so thoroughly Hitlers favorite moviemaker, Leni Riefenstahl. This is one of the crack essays in the book.” —Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, including
In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories; several plays, and five works of nonfiction, among them
Against Interpretation and
On Photography. Her latest book is
Regarding the Pain of Others (FSG, 2002). Her books have been translated into 28 languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.
Table of Contents
On Paul Goodman
Approaching Artaud
Fascinating Fascism
Under the Sign of Saturn
Syberberg's Hitler
Remembering Barthes
Mind as Passion