[ilds] Susan Sontag: literature as a purely sensorial experience

[Sumantra Nag]

Without having yet read Susan Sontag's essays or her novel as yet, I
thought I would share this essay on her view of literature as a primarily
sensory experience rather than one which expresses ideas and moulds
thought. From such a view Form becomes dominant against Content.

The view seemed very relevant to The Alexandria Quartet at least which
provides a highly sensory experience and where Form stands out in creating
a world which can be viewed as an aesthetic experience.

This essay points out that in her novel The Volcano Lover (1992) Susan
Sontag seems to modify or question her earlier view of literature as a
purely aesthetic experience which need not be interpreted through analysis.

"For all that has been said so far, then, I believe that "The Volcano
Lover" can be read as an instance of slippage from Sontag’s former
Formalist stand. Firstly, through the ironic narrativization of the
Cavaliere’s totalizing aesthetic views, I think that she actually mocks the
hermeticism of her own appraoch to the literary text,* according to which
aesthetics should be the only dominant in literature in an attempt to
reduce it to pure sensorial expression.* Secondly, she explicitly brings
into her text the theme of the ex-centrics as well as historiographic
events from a critical viewpoint, lending to her narrative an unavoidable
ideological twist and thus contesting her views as expressed in “Against
Interpretation” that the novel cannot be taken as a social, political or
cultural declaration about the world."

Sumantra Nag

Sent from my Moto G4 Plus
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