LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 23:3 March 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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American by Birth, Cosmopolitan by Choice: Susan Sontag as a
Crusader of Our Time

Miss Srutishree Mohanty, Ph.D. Research Scholar

Abstract

Susan Sontag (1933-2004), a prominent American, has made a mark in history and has carved out a distinct identity of her own in the American literary imagination because of her abiding concerns to expose and highlight the problems and issues of American life, like the baneful effects of capitalism and consumerism, drug abuse, or the dangers of a military-industrial complex. Her writings are being discussed internationally; though she was an American, her works were never only centered on America, as they touch upon issues and concerns which are truly cosmopolitan, and universal. Once Susan Sontag had devoted a chapter to the German writer Mr. Elias Canetti (1905-1994) in her book of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and his knowledge ‘‘about the exiled writer's easily generalized relation to place, and his way of claiming many places as one's territory as he had the privilege and the burden of understanding, Jew that he is, the higher cosmopolitanism. Canetti was writing in the tradition of Goethe, an 18th-century writer living in the 20th century, someone who was both cosmopolitan and universal. Like Cannetti, Susan Sontag urged “to remember your humanity and forget the rest.” She believed in the ideals of secularism, reason, libertarianism, internationalism and solidarity; she detested the way capitalism and fundamentalism were resulting in democracy’s death; and she knew that the dismantling of traditional norms by the capitalist culture, and the growth of secular consumerist capitalism was not acceptable to her. She visualized that America was trying to overpower other nations, and to empower herself by disempowering others and destroying their culture. Americans were, in fact, trying to get away with their conscience, just the way Nazi did, during Second World War. Susan Sontag travelled to Vietnam and witnessed the terrible conditions of people and soldiers, and she criticized the selfish role of American government in Vietnam War, which was resulting in the death of its own soldiers as well as that of the Vietnamese. America’s run for a munificent future at the cost of humanity was disdained by her. She believed that through art one can delight, inform as well as transform. She believed in aesthetic pleasure, but also, she emphasized that art has the power to transform the society, build nations, instill moral values and safeguard humanity at large. Susan Sontag, like Canetti, had felt in a profound way the responsibility of words, and much of her work makes the effort to communicate something of what she had learned about how to pay attention to the world by going beyond the frontiers of her own country to write about issues of universal human concerns, like the war in Vietnam and Angola, or Salvador, as another writer Joan Didion wrote about it, or the fight against AIDs, or in the field of literature, to write about the way photography determines and influences our perceptions of reality, or those manifold problems faced by Americans at home ,which , though rooted in American culture , touch upon the lives of others in other cultures.

Keywords: Susan Sontag, issues of universal human concerns, power of art and literature, transformation of society, remember humanity.

Susan Sontag, a prominent American literary writer, has made a mark in history. She has carved an identity of her own in the field of aesthetics. Her writings are being discussed internationally. Though she was an American by birth but her works encompassed the entire humanity. She was a globe-trotter and her writings focused on international and global issues.

She urged, “to remember your humanity and forget the rest.” She believed in the ideals of secularism, reason, libertarianism, internationalism and solidarity. She detested the way capitalism and fundamentalism results in democracy’s death. The dismantling of traditional norms by the capitalist culture and the growth of secular consumerist capitalism is not accepted by her.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Miss Srutishree Mohanty
Ph.D. Research Scholar at Ravenshaw University
Lecturer in English, Kujang College
Kujang, District: Cuttack, Odisha
lorypink4@gmail.com Phone: +91 7008128404
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