WiKi: 美国著名的作家和评论家著名女权主义者,她被认为是近代西方最引人注目,最有争议性的女作家及评论家。
一本《疾病的隐喻》一年多都没看完,主要时间是在厕所中度过的,不过这丝毫不影响这本书,以及苏珊本人写作的严肃性。
苏珊死于04年12月,当时纽约时报对其有一段评论,我对最后一段印象深刻。愿意大概想说明,公众对苏珊的评价差异甚殊,可谓天差地别。不过,看到这段文字的第一印象是:作为GRE考试教材,学习类比和反义很不错。如果这些单词有幸全部辨识,恭喜你,词汇量过八级不在话下。
A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960’s, Susan Sontag wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades her work was part of the contemporary canon, discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the pages of popular magazines to the Hollywood movie ”Bull Durham.”
Ms. Sontag’s work made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term.
”The theme that runs through Susan’s writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic,” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and an old friend of Ms. Sontag’s, said in a telephone interview yesterday. ”There was something unusually vivid about her writing. That’s why even if one disagrees with it — as I did frequently — it was unusually stimulating. She showed you things you hadn’t seen before; she had a way of reopening questions.”
Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull.
– From the obituary by Margalit Fox, December 29, 2004
