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 E...
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.
p17
A first-person novel with anything to mourn on its mind will be a feast of reflection on what makes that backward look so error-prone: the fallibility of memory, the impenetrability of the human heart, the obscuring distance between past and present.
p19
When the commenting, summing-up observer is impervious to doubts, the register inevitably shifts to the comic.
p27
To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it tha way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers \emph{enough}.
p28
Of course, you summon ghosts at your peril. The suffer... (查看原文)
The republic of letters is, in reality, an aristocracy. And ``poet'' has always been a \emph{titre de noblesse}. But in the Romantic era, the poet's nobility ceased to be synonymous with superiority as such and acquired an 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 \emph{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 comm... (查看原文)
还没人写过短评呢
还没人写过短评呢