Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic "Against Interpretation, " America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, "Seeing" she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theater. And in the final section, "There and Here" Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Reading A Poet's Prose
• Where the Stress Falls Afterlives: The Case of Machado de Assis A Mind in Mourning
• The Wisdom Project Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes Walser's Voice Danilo Ki¿
• Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke Pedro Páramo DQ A Letter to Borges
• Seeing A Century of Cinema Novel into Film: Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz
• A Note on Bunraku A Place for Fantasy
• The Pleasure of the Image About Hodgkin
• A Lexicon for Available Light In Memory of Their Feelings Dancer and the Dance Lincoln Kirstein Wagner's Fluids
• An Ecstasy of Lament One Hundred Years of Italian Photography
• On Bellocq Borland's Babies Certain Mapplethorpes
• A Photograph is Not an Opinion
• Or Is It?
• There and Here Homage to Halliburton Singleness Writing As Reading Thirty Years Later . . .
• Questions of Travel The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)
• The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)
• Answers to a Questionnaire Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo "There" and "Here" Joseph Brodsky On Being Translated
• Acknowledgments

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Where the Stress Falls READING A Poet's Prose "I WHO WOULD BE nothing without the Russian nineteenth century ... ," Camus declared, in 1958, in a letter of homage to Pasternak--one of the constellation of magnificent writers whose work, along with the annals of their tragic destinies, preserved, recovered, discovered in translation over the past twenty-five years, has made the Russian twentieth century an event that is (or will prove to be) equally formative and, it being our century as well, far more importunate, impinging. The Russian nineteenth century that changed our souls was an achievement of prose writers. Its twentieth century has been, mostly, an achievement of poets--but not only an achievement in poetry. About their prose the poets espoused the most passionate opinions: any ideal of seriousness inevitably seethes with dispraise. Pasternak in the last decades of his life dismissed as horribly modernist and self-conscious the splendid, subtle memoiristic prose of his youth (like Safe Conduct ), while proclaiming the novel he was then working on, Doctor Zhivago, to be the most authentic and complete of all his writings, beside which his poetry was nothing in comparison. More typically, the poets were committed to a definition of poetry as an enterprise of such inherent superiority (the highest aim of literature, the highest condition of language) that any work in prose became an inferior venture--as if prose were always a communication, a service activity. "Instruction is thenerve of prose," Mandelstam wrote in an early essay, so that "what may be meaningful to the prose writer or essayist, the poet finds absolutely meaningless." While prose writers are obliged to address themselves to the concrete audience of their contemporaries, poetry as a whole has a more or less distant, unknown addressee, says Mandelstam: "Exchanging signals with the planet Mars ... is a task worthy of a lyric poet." Tsvetaeva shares this sense of poetry as the apex of literary endeavor--which means identifying all great writing, even if prose, as poetry. "Pushkin was a poet," she concludes her essay "Pushkin and Pugachev" (1937), and "nowhere was he the poet with such force as in the 'classical' prose of The Captain's Daughter ." The same would-be paradox with which Tsvetaeva sums up her love for Pushkin's novella is elaborated by Joseph Brodsky in his essay prefacing the collected edition (in Russian) of Tsvetaeva's prose: being great prose, it must be described as "the continuation of poetry with other means." Like earlier great Russian poets, Brodsky requires for his definition of poetry a caricatural Other: the slack mental condition he equates with prose. Assuming a privative standard of prose, and of the poet's motives for turning to prose ("something usually dictated by economic considerations, 'dry spells,' or more rarely by polemical necessity"), in contrast to the most exalted, prescriptive standard of poetry (whose "true subject" is "absolute objects and absolute feelings"), it is inevitable that the poet be regarded as the aristocrat of letters, the prose writer the bourgeois or plebeian; that--another of Brodsky's images--poetry be aviation, prose the infantry. Such a definition of poetry is actually a tautology--as if prose were identical with the "prosaic." And "prosaic" as a term of denigration, meaning dull, commonplace, ordinary, tame, is precisely a Romantic idea. (The OED gives 1813 as its earliest use in this figurative sense.) In the "defense of poetry" that is one of the signature themes of the Romantic literatures of Western Europe, poetry is a form of both language and being: an ideal of intensity, absolute candor, nobility, heroism. The republic of letters is, in reality, an aristocracy. And "poet" has always been a titre de noblesse. But in the Romantic era, the poet's nobility ceased to be synonymous with superiority as such and acquiredan adversary role: the poet as the avatar of freedom. The Romantics invented the writer as hero, a figure central to Russian literature (which does not get under way until the early nineteenth century); and, as it happened, history made of rhetoric a reality. The great Russian writers are heroes--they have no choice if they are to be great writers--and Russian literature has continued to breed Romantic notions of the poet. To the modern Russian poets, poetry defends nonconformity, freedom, individuality against the social, the wretched vulgar present, the communal drone. (It is as if prose in its true state were, finally, the State.) No wonder they go on insisting on the absoluteness of poetry and its radical difference from prose.     PROSE IS TO POETRY , said Valéry, as walking is to dancing--Romantic assumptions about poetry's inherent superiority hardly being confined to the great Russian poets. For the poet to turn to prose, says Brodsky, is always a falling off, "like the shift from full gallop to a trot." The contrast is not just one of velocity, of course, but one of mass: lyric poetry's compactness versus the sheer extendedness of prose. (That virtuoso of extended prose, of the art of anti-laconicism, Gertrude Stein, said that poetry is nouns, prose is verbs. In other words, the distinctive genius of poetry is naming, that of prose, to show movement, process, time--past, present, and future.) The collected prose of any major poet who has written major prose--Valery, Rilke, Brecht, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva--is far bulkier than his or her collected poems. There is something equivalent in literature to the prestige the Romantics conferred on thinness. That poets regularly produce prose, while prose writers rarely write poetry, is not, as Brodsky argues, evidence of poetry's superiority. According to Brodsky, "The poet, in principle, is 'higher' than the prose writer ... because a hard-up poet can sit down and compose an article, whereas in similar straits a prose writer would hardly give thought to a poem." But the point surely is not that writing poetry is less well paid than writing prose but that it is special--the marginalizing of poetry and its audience; that what was once considered a normal skill, like playing a musical instrument, now seems the province of the difficultand the intimidating. Not only prose writers but cultivated people generally no longer write poetry. (As poetry is no longer, as a matter of course, something to memorize.) Modern performance in literature is partly shaped by the widespread discrediting of the idea of literary virtuosity; by a very real loss of virtuosity. It now seems utterly extraordinary that anyone can write brilliant prose in more than one language; we marvel at a Nabokov, a Beckett, a Cabrera Infante--but until two centuries ago such virtuosity would have been taken for granted. So, until recently, was the ability to write poetry as well as prose. In the twentieth century, writing poems tends to be a dalliance of a prose writer's youth (Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov ...) or an activity practiced with the left hand (Borges, Updike ...). Being a poet is assumed to be more than writing poetry, even great poetry: Lawrence and Brecht, who wrote great poems, are not generally considered great poets. Being a poet is to define oneself as, to persist (against odds) in being, only a poet. Thus, the one generally acknowledged instance in twentieth-century literature of a great prose writer who was also a great poet, Thomas Hardy, is someone who renounced writing novels in order to write poetry. (Hardy ceased to be a prose writer. He became a poet.) In that sense the Romantic notion of the poet, as someone who has a maximal relation to poetry, has prevailed; and not only among the modern Russian writers. An exception is made for criticism, however. The poet who is also a master practitioner of the critical essay loses no status as a poet; from Blok to Brodsky, most of the major Russian poets have written splendid critical prose. Indeed, since the Romantic era, most of the truly influential critics have been poets: Coleridge, Baudelaire, Valéry, Eliot. That other forms of prose are more rarely attempted marks a great difference from the Romantic era. A Goethe or Pushkin or Leopardi, who wrote both great poetry and great (non-critical) prose, did not seem odd or presumptuous. But the bifurcation of standards for prose in succeeding literary generations--the emergence of a minority tradition of "art" prose, the ascendancy of illiterate and para-literate prose--has made that kind of accomplishment far more anomalous. Actually, the frontier between prose and poetry has become more and more permeable--unified by the ethos of maximalism characteristicof the modern artist: to create work that goes as far as it can go. The standard that seems eminently appropriate to lyric poetry, according to which poems may be regarded as linguistic artifacts to which nothing further can be done, now influences much of what is distinctively modern in prose. Precisely as prose, since Flaubert, has aspired to some of the intensity, velocity, and lexical inevitability of poetry, there seems a greater need to shore up the two-party system in literature, to distinguish prose from poetry, and to oppose them. Why it is prose, not poetry, that is always on the defensive is that the party of prose seems at best an ad hoc coalition. How can one not be suspicious of a label that now encompasses the essay, the memoir, the novel or short story, the play? Prose is not just a ghostly category, a state of language defined negatively, by its opposite: poetry. ( "Tout ce qui n'est point prose est vers, et tout ce qui n'est point vers est prose," as the philosophy teacher in Molière ' s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme proclaims, so that the bourgeois can discover that all his life he has been--surprise!--speaking prose.) Now it is a catchall for a panoply of literary forms that, in their modern evolution and high-speed dissolution, one no longer knows how to name. As a term used to describe what Tsvetaeva wrote that couldn't be called poetry, "prose" is a relatively recent notion. When essays no longer seem like what used to be called essays, and long and short fictions no longer like what used to be called novels and stories, we call them prose.     ONE OF THE GREAT EVENTS of twentieth-century literature has been the evolution of a particular kind of prose: impatient, ardent, elliptical, usually in the first person, often using discontinuous or broken forms, that is mainly written by poets (or if not, by writers with the standard of poetry in mind). For some poets, to write prose is to practice a genuinely different activity, to have a different (more persuasive, more reasonable) voice. The criticism and cultural journalism of Eliot and Auden and Paz, excellent as they are, are not written in poet's prose. The criticism and occasional pieces of Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva are. In contrast to Mandelstam--who wrote criticism, journalism, a poetics ("Conversation about Dante"), a novella ( The Egyptian Stamp ), a memoir (The Noise of Time )--Tsvetaeva in her prose offers a narrower range of genres, a purer example of poet's prose. Poet's prose not only has a particular fervor, density, velocity, fiber. It has a distinctive subject: the growth of the poet's vocation. Typically, it takes the form of two kinds of narrative. One is directly autobiographical. The other, also in the shape of a memoir, is the portrait of another person, either a fellow writer (often of the older generation, and a mentor) or a beloved relative (usually a parent or grandparent). Homage to others is the complement to accounts of oneself: the poet is saved from vulgar egoism by the strength and purity of his or her admirations. In paying homage to the important models and evoking the decisive encounters, both in real life and in literature, the writer is enunciating the standards by which the self is to be judged. Poet's prose is mostly about being a poet. And to write such autobiography, as to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) is often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. (To have two selves is the definition of a pathetic fate.) Much of the prose of poets--particularly in the memoiristic form--is devoted to chronicling the triumphant emergence of the poet self. (In the journal or diary, the other major genre of poet's prose, the focus is on the gap between the poet and the daily self, and the often untriumphant transactions between the two. The diaries--for example, Baudelaire's or Blok's--abound with rules for protecting the poet self; desperate maxims of encouragement; accounts of dangers, discouragements, and defeats.) Many of Tsvetaeva's writings in prose are portraits of the self as poet. In the memoir of Max Voloshin, "A Living Word about a Living Man" (1933), Tsvetaeva evokes the bespectacled, defiant schoolgirl with a shaved head who has just published her first book of poems; Voloshin, an established poet and critic, having praised her book, arrived unannounced to call on her. (The year is 1910 and Tsvetaeva is eighteen. Like most poets, unlike most prose writers, she was in precocious command of her gifts.) The fond evocation of what she calls Voloshin's "insatiability for the genuine" is, of course, Tsvetaeva's avowal about herself. The more directly memoiristic texts are also accountsof the growth of the poet's vocation. "Mother and Music" (1935) describes the birth of the poet's lyricism through the household's immersion in music; Tsvetaeva's mother was a pianist. "My Pushkin" (1957) recounts the birth of the poet's capacity for passion (and its peculiar bent--"all the passion in me for unhappy non-reciprocal love") by recalling the relation Tsvetaeva had, in the very earliest years of her childhood, with the image and legend of Pushkin. The prose of poets is typically elegiac, retrospective. It is as if the subject evoked belongs, by definition, to the vanished past. The occasion may be a literal death--the memoirs of both Voloshin and Bely. But it is not the tragedy of the exile, not even the atrocious privation and suffering endured by Tsvetaeva in exile and up to the time she returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 (where, now an internal exile, she committed suicide in August 1941), that accounts for this elegiac register. In prose the poet is always mourning a lost Eden; asking memory to speak, or sob. A poet's prose is the autobiography of ardor. All of Tsvetaeva's work is an argument for rapture; and for genius, that is, for hierarchy: a poetics of the Promethean. "Our whole relation to art is an exception in favor of genius," as Tsvetaeva wrote in her stupendous essay "Art in the Light of Conscience." To be a poet is a state of being, elevated being: Tsvetaeva speaks of her love for "what is highest." There is the same quality of emotional soaring in her prose as in her poetry: no modern writer takes one as close to an experience of sublimity. As Tsvetaeva points out, "No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?" [1983] WHERE THE STRESS FALLS. Copyright (c) 2001 by Susan Sontag. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Excerpted from Where the Stress Falls: Essays by Susan Sontag All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Sontag collects 41 essays that frame over 20 years of astute observations on culture, arts, and aesthetics. Previously published as magazine articles, articles for tourist catalogs, program notes for puppet theater or ballet performances, notes for art exhibition catalogs, and introductions, forewords, or afterwords in other authors' monographs, the essays are organized into three categories. "Reading" encompasses Sontag's erudite, critical renderings on autobiography and the works and influence of international literary figures such as Machado de Assis, Roland Barthes, Danilo Ki, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Robert Walser. In the middle section, "Seeing," Sontag is more approachable, expressing her perceptive and provocative opinions on cinema, garden history, photography, painting, opera, drama, and dance. Finally, in "There and Now," Sontag recounts her experiences in Sarajevo and her feelings regarding travel, activism, writing, and translations. Several of the essays such as "A Letter to Borges" appear here in English for the first time. Although an introduction to prepare newcomers to Sontag for what follows would have been helpful, this remains an attractive and interesting collection from an important cultural thinker. Recommended for academic and public libraries. Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Lib., New Brunswick, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist, Sontag, whose novel In America won a National Book Award in 2000, reaches a big audience even as she divides critics. First and foremost an essayist, Sontag tackles varied interests that are compelling in part for their apparent randomness. This new collection of occasional articles includes punditry on literature, film, photography, theater and her own literary career, among other subjects. Once a champion of then-lesser-known writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Roland Barthes, she now boosts the worthy Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis and Swiss writer Robert Walser. Sometimes her enthused advocacy seems overstated, such as when she argues a little too forcefully for Glenway Wescott as a novelist and for the poet Adam Zagajewski as a prose writer. A sugary memorial for New York City Ballet founder Lincoln Kirstein is also inadequate on many levels. Still, Sontag's appetite for trends and achievements is still so fierce, and she switches subjects so quickly and lithely, that if one short essay does not convince, the next one probably will. One can't help admiring the conviction evident in "Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo," her account of directing a Beckett play in the war-torn city. There is no one quite like Sontag, and her many admirers will enjoy following up on her reading tips and engaging in debate with her via this book. (Sept.) Forecast: Expect solid sales among Sontag's fans, some of whom will pick this book up as a first foray into her essays. For those who need assistance in entering the Sontag oeuvre, biographer and Baruch College professor Carl Rollyson's Reading Susan Sontag: An Introduction to Her Work is forthcoming in October (Ivan R. Dee). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Sontag is one of the US's most quoted writers. Her pronouncements on popular culture, film, literature, and other arts such as opera and dance pop up repeatedly in the media. She published most of her important essays between 1966 and 1980, and then she gradually turned toward writing more fiction. Her high visibility, however, means that she is constantly asked for contributions to other writers' books, to theater programs, and to other cultural events. The present collection is a miscellany of this nonfiction from the past 20 years. Although a few pieces rival in importance her earlier work, many others seem slight and lack the provocative prose of classic essays such as "Against Interpretation" and "The Imagination of Disaster." Although this collection has an autobiographical section, it does not include her most self-revealing essay, "Pilgrimage." Unlike Styles of Radical Will (1969) and Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), the present collection seems to have no structure or central organizing principle. As a result, it does not add a cubit to her stature. It will interest general readers and perhaps graduate students and advanced scholars. Undergraduates are advised to read her earlier collections. C. Rollyson Bernard M. Baruch College, CUNY

Booklist Review

Sontag won the National Book Award for her novel In America [BKL F 1 00], and readers of her ardent literary essays know that, for Sontag, novelists are nearly at the pinnacle of the universe of words, just a step below the poets. Yet her criticism is art in its own right, so gorgeously formed and creative, so vital and searching, deeply rooted in passionately intelligent reading and unstinting curiosity. Forty-one essays based on two decades of international cultural attentiveness create a substantial and wonderfully musical collection that makes matters literary and artistic urgent and thrilling. A close consideration of poets' prose inspires a sizzling tribute to Russian literature, and thoughts of Glenway Wescott's all-but-forgotten novel, The Pilgrim Hawk, spark a rousing discussion of various approaches to fiction. Sontag is just as piercing and revelatory in her criticism of dance (Lincoln Kirstein), photography (Bellocq), and painting (Howard Hodgkin). And in her reflections on staging Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993, she is indelibly eloquent about what art brings to life and vice versa. Donna Seaman

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford University. She was the author of 17 books including four novels, a collection of short stories, several plays, and eight works of nonfiction. Her novels are The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction. On Photography received the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Art in America. She also wrote and directed four feature films and stage plays in the United States and Europe. She died from leukemia on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71.

(Bowker Author Biography)