Archana Verma

Paper: Susan Sontag as a Feminine Genius of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Susan Sontag, also known as ‘The Dark Lady of American Letters’, is a feminine genius of the Twentieth Century. Her association with the PEN American Centre, groomed her as a fine writer with ‘free expression’ and with a very specific possession towards the concept of art. As a critic and a creative writer, Sontag touched upon areas as diverse as photography, culture, media, AIDS and other illness, and war conflicts. Disrupting the conventional mode of narrative, her writings enhanced with the “new sensibility” which was “defiantly pluralistic”. Her engagement with the foremost theorists of our time like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, T.S. Eliot and others is reflected in Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness as Metaphor, and Against Interpretation. Her works aim at delineating “the modern sensibility from as many angles as possible”. Despite being one of the most intellectual figures of her time, her writings were disregarded by the contemporary scholars. The paper brings to the fore Sontag as a feminine genius who with the spirit of assistance and the deliberation of the time ahead has reached out for the well-being of the whole human kind.

Archana Verma is a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. She has completed her M. Phil from ISM, Dhanbad. Her areas of interest include Modern Poetry, Black Literature and Gender Studies.