The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and imp… - Susan Sontag
" "The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force - not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. Mostly it is a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity.
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About Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (16 January 1933 – 28 December 2004) was an American essayist, literary critic, cultural theorist, and political activist.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Susan Rosenblatt
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Additional quotes by Susan Sontag
In some respects the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity for fewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography’s definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.”
Interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.
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