It is becoming difficult to sustain any fervent interest in Susan Sontag's career. Her critical ideas, embracing everyone from Hegel to Walter Benjamin, appear more and more merely polemical excursions in phenomenological or structuralist thought. Against Interpretation had its topical cachet: a bubbly belligerent advocacy of "camp," happenings, Levi-Strauss, the nouveau roman, Artaud. What it lacked in intelligibility, it made up for in le dernier cri. With Styles of Radical Will, the avant garde pantheon opens its doors to Cage, "the pornographic imagination," "the theory of art as assault on the audience," New Left politics. These essays, more carefully constructed than Miss Sontag's previous forays, are also much duller. How surprisingly banal, how tiresome Miss Sontag's militant language seems: "an erotics of agony," "exemplary," "excruciating," "ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing." Even the famous use of inverted commas cannot save Miss Sontag's daring cliches: "The Vietnamese are 'whole' human beings, not? 'split' as we are." Again and again Miss Sontag bemoans the loss of spontaneity, the deadening effects of analysis, all the while performing as the most abstract, benighted, "complex" savant. Of course, there are interesting or reflective passages: Miss Sontag is a serious and ambitious critic. Still, a private quarrel goes on between what she is and what she seeks, giving the aura of an embalmed intensity.
Pub Date: March 21, 1969
ISBN: 0312420218
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1969
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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