Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374248583
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Publisher Description

Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141914955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. 'Powerful, fascinating. Sontag is our outstanding contemporary writer in the moralist tradition'Sunday Times 'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering'The New York Times 'A far-reaching set of ruminations on human suffering, the nature of goodness, the lures, deceptions and truth of images . . . in short, a summary of what it means to be alive and alert in the twentieth century'Independent 'Sontag is on top form: firing devastating questions'Los Angeles Times 'Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive'Metro One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

On Photography

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description

I, etcetera

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

Author: Elaine Scarry
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195036018
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering

Author: Timothy Keller
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 1594634408
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
"The question of why God would allow pain and suffering in the world has vexed believers and nonbelievers forever. In Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, Timothy Keller takes on this enduring issue and shows that there is meaning and reason behind pain and suffering, making a forceful and groundbreaking case that this essential part of the human experience can be overcome only by understanding our relationship with God. Using biblical wisdom and personal stories of overcoming adversity, Keller brings a much-needed, fresh viewpoint to this important issue."--Back cover

Alice in Bed

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466818727
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374100764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 542

Book Description
This second of three volumes begins in the middle of the 1960s and traces Sontag's evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world to renowned critic.

Under the Sign of Saturn

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312420086
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
This third essay collection by America's leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.