Sontag and Kael

Sontag and Kael PDF Author: Craig Seligman
Publisher: Counterpoint
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
For fans of high culture, pop culture and American genius, a personal and idiosyncratic exploration of two of the 20th century's most distinguished cultural icons. With wit and style worthy of his subjects, Craig Seligman explores the enduring influence of two critics who defined the cultural sensibilities of a generation: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Though outwardly they had several things in common--they were both Westerners who came east, both schooled in philosophy, both secular Jews, and both single mothers--they were polar opposites in temperament and approach. From the very beginning Seligman makes his sympathies clear: Sontag is a writer he reveres; but Kael is a writer he loves.He approaches both critics through their work, whose fundamental parallels serve to sharpen their differences. Tone is the most obvious area where they're at odds. Kael practiced a kind of verbal jazz, exuberant, excessive, intimate, emotional, and funny. Sontag is formal and a little icy--a model of detachment. Kael never changed her approach from her first review to her last, while mutability has been one of the defining motifs of Sontag's career. Moral questions obsess Sontag; they interested

Sontag and Kael

Sontag and Kael PDF Author: Craig Seligman
Publisher: Counterpoint
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
For fans of high culture, pop culture and American genius, a personal and idiosyncratic exploration of two of the 20th century's most distinguished cultural icons. With wit and style worthy of his subjects, Craig Seligman explores the enduring influence of two critics who defined the cultural sensibilities of a generation: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Though outwardly they had several things in common--they were both Westerners who came east, both schooled in philosophy, both secular Jews, and both single mothers--they were polar opposites in temperament and approach. From the very beginning Seligman makes his sympathies clear: Sontag is a writer he reveres; but Kael is a writer he loves.He approaches both critics through their work, whose fundamental parallels serve to sharpen their differences. Tone is the most obvious area where they're at odds. Kael practiced a kind of verbal jazz, exuberant, excessive, intimate, emotional, and funny. Sontag is formal and a little icy--a model of detachment. Kael never changed her approach from her first review to her last, while mutability has been one of the defining motifs of Sontag's career. Moral questions obsess Sontag; they interested

Sontag and Kael

Sontag and Kael PDF Author: Craig Seligman
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582433127
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A witty and stylish assessment of the work of two icons of cultural criticism: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Though outwardly they had some things in common--they were both Westerners who came east, both schooled in philosophy, both secular Jews and both single mothers--they were polar opposites in temperament and approach. Seligman approaches both women through their widely discussed work. Kael practiced a kind of verbal jazz--exuberant, excessive, intimate, emotional and funny. Sontag is formal and rather icy. From the beginning it's clear where Seligman's sympathies lie: Sontag is a critic he reveres; but Kael is a critic he loves. But for all his reservations about Sontag, he considers both writers magnificent and his exploration of their differences results in this luminously written landmark of criticism.

Sharp

Sharp PDF Author: Michelle Dean
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802165710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A “deeply researched and uncommonly engrossing” book profiling ten trailblazing literary women, including Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion (Paris Review). In Sharp, Michelle Dean explores the lives of ten women of vastly different backgrounds and points of view who all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America. These women—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—are united by what Dean calls “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing despite the extreme condescension of the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael PDF Author: Pauline Kael
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598531719
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 1186

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Book Description
A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and her reviews became a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here are her appraisals of era-defining films such as Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery—all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

Where the Stress Falls

Where the Stress Falls PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429923822
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "someone who is interested in everything." Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic Against Interpretation, our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas. "Reading" offers ardent, freewheeling considerations of talismanic writers from her own private canon, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Randall Jarrell, Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis, W. G. Sebald, Borges, and Elizabeth Hardwick. "Seeing" is a series of luminous and incisive encounters with film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theatre. And in the final section, "There and Here," Sontag explores some of her own commitments: to the work (and activism) of conscience, to the concreteness of historical understanding, and to the vocation of the writer. Where the Stress Falls records a great American writer's urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century, and provides a brilliant and clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake, in this new century, in the survival of that inheritance.

Under the Sign of Saturn

Under the Sign of Saturn PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312420086
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
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.

Reborn

Reborn PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312428502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Presents excerpts from the early writings of the author, with reflections on her meetings with influential writers and intellectuals, her literary ambitions, and her criticisms of other writers.

The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag

The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag PDF Author: Edward Field
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299213234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York’s literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris’s Left Bank and Tangier—where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay—Field opens the closet door to reveal, as never been seen before, some of the most important writers of his time. Here are young, beautiful Susan Sontag sitting at the feet of her idol Alfred Chester, who shrewdly plotted to marry her; May Swenson and her two loves; Paul and Jane Bowles in their ambiguous marriage; Frank O’Hara in and out of bed; Fritz Peters, the anointed son of Gurdjieff; and James Baldwin, Isabel Miller (Patience and Sarah), Tobias Schneebaum, Robert Friend, and many others. With its intimate portraits, Field’s memoir brings back a forgotten era—postwar bohemia—bawdy, comical, romantic, sad, and heroic.

Notes on Sontag

Notes on Sontag PDF Author: Phillip Lopate
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829879
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

Understanding Susan Sontag

Understanding Susan Sontag PDF Author: Carl Rollyson
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611176816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
A comprehensive account of the author's entire career through the lens of her recently published diaries With the publication of Susan Sontag's diaries, the development of her career can now be evaluated in a more genetic sense, so that the origins of her ideas and plans for publication are made plain in the context of her role as a public intellectual, who is increasingly aware of her impact on her culture. In Understanding Susan Sontag, Carl Rollyson not only provides an introduction to her essays, novels, plays, films, diaries, and uncollected work published in various periodicals, he now has a lens through which to reevaluate classic texts such as Against Interpretation and On Photography, providing both students and advanced scholars a renewed sense of her importance and impact. Rollyson devotes separate chapters to Sontag's biography; her early novels; her landmark essay collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will; her films; her major mid-career books, On Photography and its sequel, Regarding the Pain of Others; and Illness as Metaphor and its sequel, AIDS and Its Metaphors, together with her groundbreaking short story, "The Way We Live Now." Sontag's later essay collections and biographical profiles, collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, Where the Stress Falls, and At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, also receive a fresh assessment, as does her later work in short fiction, the novel, and drama, with a chapter discussing I, etcetera; two historical novels, The Volcano Lover and In America; and her plays, A Parsifal, Alice in Bed, and her adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. Chapters on her diaries and uncollected prose, along with a primary and secondary bibliography, complete this comprehensive study.