Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) once declared: "My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything'. Being interested in 'everything' had come naturally to me." This statement was made thirty years after the publication of Against Interpretation in 1966, towards the end of a prolific career as an essayist, diarist, novelist, filmmaker, and activist. The Greco-Roman classics play an intriguing part in this narrative of insatiable thirst for knowledge. Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics sets out to focus on this juncture in her work. Instead of offering an account of antiquity in Sontag, or of Sontag on antiquity, the collected chapters are specifically concerned with her as a case of a thinker in whom the classical tradition does not come into exclusive focus, but emerges tangentially--in often disparate and exiguous traces, connections, and references within a polymathic awareness. This volume examines Sontag's work and life to probe new strategies of plotting antiquity, when its presence in modernity is alluring yet barely there, and when the connective thread of influence seems to exist at breaking point. Susan Sontag's Tangential Classics directs our attention to a twentieth-century thinker who invites a markedly different perception of antiquity and its influence in her thought: at once captivating and light, provocative and uncertain.

Laura Jansen, University of Bristol

Laura Jansen is Associate Professor (Reader) of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. She is General Editor of Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (Bloomsbury), the author of Borges' Classics (Cambridge, 2018), and editor of The Roman Paratext (Cambridge, 2014), and Anne Carson/Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Introduction: Sontag's Classics, Barely There, Somewhere1. Sontag's Classical World: From Against Interpretation to The Volcano Lover2. The Diaries and the Art of the Aphorism3. Night-Sides: Sontag and Sophocles on Bodily Suffering4. Art and the Nourishment of Consciousness: Sontag in Plato's and Kafka's Cave5. The Morality of Style: Sontag and Seneca6. Against Immersion7. The Writhing Laocoön: Susan Sontag and the Aesthetics of Suffering8. Fear of Flaying: Sontag, Language, Animality9. The Dream Machine: Plato and LucretiusEpilogue: Sontag and the Archaeology of a Tangential Classics