The Sensibilities of Susan Sontag, 1933-2004=20

=20

Two years after her death, Susan Sontag remains a prominent public
intellectual in the United States. For example, in 2005, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art organized an exhibit to pay tribute to her
contribution to the understanding of photography. On September 10,
2006, The New York Times Sunday Magazine published extensive excerpts
from her journals. Projected to be published in full in 2008-09, they
will undoubtedly enlarge our knowledge of Sontag's life and working
methods. But since Sontag's interests were never bound within easy
categories, whether political, intellectual, aesthetic, or sexual-her
work poses a range of interesting questions to literary scholars. In
this seminar, we will seek to explore Sontag as a humanist whose work
was largely inspired by a need to put cultures in contact-for ethical as
well as aesthetic purposes. As she concluded in her "Literature as
Freedom" (an acceptance speech for the 2003 Peace Prize awarded to her
by the German book trade), literature offers a "passport to enter a
larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.''

=20

Some of the topics this seminar might explore are:

=20

Sontag as "cultural translator" bridging American and European cultures
and thought

Sontag as comparatist/traveler

Originality and Intertextuality in Sontag

Methodology(-ies) of her essays, fiction

The autobiographical in Sontag

Sontag as Woman Writer

Sontag as a creative collaborator

Sontag's theatricality: operas, divas, actresses, and plays

Sontag's "Evolution from aesthetics to ethics"=20

The visual and the verbal in Sontag

Sontag and cultural hierarchies

Contributions to America public intellectual life=20

Sontag and the political: activism. terrorism, the utopian and the
apocalyptic

Historicizing Sontag; Sontag and history

Sontag and the body

=20

You may submit abstracts for 20-minutes papers at
http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/acla2007/?p=3D54
<http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/acla2007/?p=3D54> by November 1, 2006. =20

Seminar organizers: Dr. Barbara Ching and Dr. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor
(University of Memphis)

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Thu Oct 05 2006 - 01:55:15 EDT