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Styles of Radical Will

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Styles of Radical Will

By: Susan Sontag
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
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About this listen

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

In "The Aesthetics of Silence", Sontag examines how silence mediates the role of art as a form of spirituality in an increasingly secular culture. "The Pornographic Imagination" attempts to define and understand the genre of pornography. "What's Happening in America" muses on the state of the country in 1966, when the essay was written, discussing history, politics, and consumerism. Other essays in Styles of Radical Will are "Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran", "Theatre and Film", "Bergman's Persona", "Godard", and "Trip to Hanoi".

©2013 Susan Sontag (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Essays Social Sciences Nonfiction Socialism
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Of this batch of essays, only two really engaged - the one on pornography as art, and the one on Jean-Luc Goddard (which made me want to re-watch a bunch of his 1960s films).

The final essays, on Sontag's trip to North Vietnam during the war, was so full of clichés, casual paternalistic racism, and banalities that it greatly reduced my respect for her.

As an audiobook, the narrator does a passable job - if a bit too gushing and naïve-sounding - but a) why not chapter title metadata to allow skipping to essays that interest the most, and b) why put all the footnotes for every essay in a separate chapter at the very end? Maddening.

Disappointing after the Against Interpretation collection

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