ABSTRACT
One might ask what loyalty Susan Sontag has ever felt to the American political-cultural milieu of the old New York intelligentsia. The American novel particularly made Sontag harsh: To narrate is palpably to employ one’s intelligence; the unity of narration characteristic of European and Latin American fiction is the unity of the narrator’s intelligence. Sontag is herself a writer of novels of decided surface transparency, works that set out to evoke new pleasures, such as “the pleasure of solving a problem.” The existentialism that had been introduced in the mid-1940s by the likes of Partisan Review, for instance, was already a standard in the universities when Sontag was a student. Sontag’s stories will be about power and will, intense reflections of conscience, and about mourning. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
