Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday 28 December, 2004. Ten years later, almost alone among American intellectuals, she would called for vigorous Western — and American — intervention in the Balkans to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to stop Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Susan Sontag is one of the US's finest intellectuals, and in these two texts Sontag applies her piercing intellect to the topic of how language is used with respect to illness, how illnesses are used as metaphors and what metaphors typically are associated with an illness. “Andy Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time – life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited? Susan Sontags Death Kit opens as the story of a man who, in the course of a train journey, becomes convinced he has recently killed someone. The first thing is not to feel sorry for yourself.”, She learned as much as possible about the disease and later wrote “Illness as Metaphor,” an influential essay condemning the abuse of tuberculosis and cancer as metaphors that transfer responsibility for sickness to the victims, who are made to believe they have brought suffering on themselves. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. In an interview for the Paris Review, in 1995, Sontag was asked what she thought was the purpose of literature. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom.”, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories enthralled her with their “mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess.” Upon reading Jack London’s “Martin Eden,” she determined she would become a writer. She was 71. Her papers — manuscripts, diaries, journals and correspondence — as well as her 25,000-volume personal library were acquired by the UCLA Library in 2002 and will be housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. Famous Author Revolted Against Death. The pictures showed soldiers torturing Iraqis: chaining them to walls; forcing them to stand in painful and humiliating positions; piling them, naked, into human pyramids. The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. She refused to hear that she was dying, even in the midst of her treatments. Though this label was never bestowed on her, I’d say she was also one of our most famous single mothers. Susan passed away on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71 in New York City, New York, USA. Sontag died at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, said Esther Carver, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Sontag’s third cancer comes into focus when Sookhee Chinkhan, her housekeeper, who’s been with her for over a decade, sees bruises on her back when she is drawing her bath. ... After Sontag's death, Newsweek published an article about Annie Leibovitz that made clear references to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag. Susan Sontag Death Susan passed away on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71 in New York City, New York, USA. Sontag died at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, said Esther Carver, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (search) in Manhattan. Soon Sontag’s provocative essays on Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Jasper Johns and the Supremes began to spice Partisan Review’s pages. When the results of these words became evident – estimates suggest between 465,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis died – those responsible tried to separate the reality from its representation. See Forward: On Discord and Desire. Anthony Veasna So, acclaimed fiction writer and promising talent, dead at 28. Years before, in her great collection On Photography, Sontag had called it a “predatory weapon” and said that “there is aggression implicit in every use of the camera”. ― Susan Sontag, quote from Regarding the Pain of Others ... and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. Susan Sontag. They also went back to the beginning of Sontag’s own life. The images they created had not been kept secret. A few weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. I could go somewhere else. I wanted desperately to crack the code.”. 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