Culture Critic Sontag to Discuss Art of Fiction

Culture Critic Sontag to Discuss Art of Fiction

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff
Oct. 8, 1998

Susan Sontag, a novelist, essayist and culture critic who braved shellings and
sniper fire to produce a play in Sarajevo during the height of the siege in 1993,
will talk about fiction during a visit to Rice.

Sontag will present a lecture titled "The Art of Fiction: A Reading"
at 5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, in Stude Concert Hall of Alice Pratt Brown Hall. The
event, which is sponsored by the Friends of Fondren Library with funding assistance
from the Brown Foundation, is free and open to the public.

"Sontag is interested in all things concerning writing–from the mechanism
of the process to the high nature of the calling," according to the preface
to an interview with Sontag published in the winter 1995 edition of The Paris
Review. "She has many missions, but foremost among them is the vocation of
the writer."

Sontag is the author of three novels: "The Benefactor" (1963), "Death
Kit" (1967) and the critically acclaimed "The Volcano" (1992),
which is about the doomed love affair between British admiral Lord Horatio Nelson
and Lady Emma Hamilton in the 18th century. She also has a collection of short
stories and six collections of essays. She is a frequent contributor to the New
Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Atlantic
and other publications. Her books have been translated into 23 languages. She
has also written and directed four feature-length films, two of which– "Brother
Carl" and "Duet for Cannibals"–have been published as screenplays.

She is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a five-year MacArthur
Fellow.

Sontag was born in 1933 in New York City. She graduated from the University of
Chicago in 1951 and received two master’s degrees from Harvard–one in English
in 1954 and another in philosophy in 1955.

During the Serbian siege of Sarajevo she made frequent visits to the city. In
1993, she volunteered to produce "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett.
Some members of her cast suffered so much from hunger that frequent breaks were
required during rehearsal. Other actors braved sniper fire to reach the theater.

Muhamed Kresevljakovic, Sarajevo’s mayor at the time, declared her an honorary
citizen, making her only one of two foreigners so honored. The second person to
receive the honor was Lt. Gen. Phillippe Morillon, the former commander of the
United Nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

" I’m not spending time in Sarajevo to write about it," Sontag said
in the Paris Review interview. "For the moment it’s enough for me just to
be there as much as I can: to witness, to lament, to offer a mode of noncomplicity,
to pitch in. The duties of a human being, one who believes in right action, not
of writer."

But she did write about the siege and war.

In the Dec. 25, 1995, edition of the Nation she wrote, "One question I’m
often asked after returning from a stay in Sarajevo is why other well-known writers
besides myself haven’t spent time there. Why so little response to what happened
in Bosnia? For several decades it has been a journalistic and academic commonplace
to say that intellectuals, as a class, are obsolete–an example of an analysis
willing itself to be an imperative. Now here are voices proclaiming that Europe
is dead, too. It may be more true to say that Europe has yet to be born."

Richard Lacayo writing in the Oct. 24, 1988, issue of Time said, "It’s typical
of Sontag that she would turn a personal preoccupation into an occasion for larger
reflections. Her collected work is a map of her consuming passions."

For more information call Friends of Fondren Library at (713) 285-5157