ABSTRACT
Using her vast skills as a literary and artistic critic and theorist, Susan Sontag when confronted with her diagnosis of cancer turned to linguistic and hermeneutic analysis as a way of coping and indeed surviving. Her illness books, which include Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, have become companions for many who face the daunting world of illness and recovery, though the books (especially the second) have not been without causing controversies of their own. This chapter explores Sontag’s illness narratives from their literary and linguistic perspectives, focusing on the reading skills she brings to her own illness, arguing that cancer is very much the focus of the first book, and emphasizing how her reading of works of authors such as Thomas Mann and John Keats shapes her approach to empowering those who are ill.
