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.’’

Some of the topics this seminar might explore are:

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”

The visual and the verbal in Sontag

Sontag and cultural hierarchies

Contributions to America public intellectual life

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

Historicizing Sontag; Sontag and history

Sontag and the body

You may submit abstracts for 20-minutes papers at http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/acla2007/?p=54 by November 1, 2006.

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