This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Great Post at Grad Student Madness...

...a blog I'll be adding to my still unalphabetized blogroll, about Philip Rieff and Susan Sontag. Parenthetical comments UD's:



It was actually no surprise for me when both of them announced that we were living with the first generation of genuine Western barbarians at nearly the same time. There was a deep seriousness and even sternness to both scholars that transcended the simplistic political categories that divided them. Sontag was a leftist, and David Rieff, the son of both Sontag and Rieff, has described his father as being "to the right of Attila the Hun". But that doesn't really get at the truth of it. Rieff was certainly a conservative thinker, and perhaps one of the greatest conservative thinkers that American academia has yet produced. And yet, his strange and aphoristic writing seems to beckon the reader towards a life of patient and slow quasi-rabbinical study of high culture that leads away from all political struggles. Rieff and Sontag were both cultural mandarins... and so shared the same devotions (as the devout), and the same inflections long after their divorce.

Besides, Sontag's work is much more "culturally conservative" than most conservatives would admit, and Rieff's work is less "reactionary" than many on the left claim. It was no joke that he advised us to become 'inactivists' in his last interviews. A large chunk of his book Fellow Teachers deals with the cultural wreckage wrought by scholar/teachers who decided to become activists. [Scroll a couple of posts down for Stanley Fish's dive into this wreck.] And Rieff's style makes it extremely hard to pigeon-hole. Usually, you can puzzle through just what point he's making, but not quite know what his take is on it. He descibes the sacred/cultural world that we have lost, and the abyss we have gained, but you're never quite sure if he thinks we could return, and he says at various points that he wouldn't want to anyway.

Sontag's writing suffers from the same problems as Rieff's; it can be willfully obtuse and frustratingly self-contradictory. At times, one wonders just what she is getting at as well. Overall, I would say that she was the sloppier writer, and that nothing after Against Interpretation was quite as significant as those essays. But, when she was "on", she was one of the best essayists we had, and well worth studying still. I do think that his writing will be more important in the academy, but hers will probably have the wider influence. [Here's how I'd put it: Sontag's writing was often spectacular -- infused with intense life, like Jan Morris's. Even if her content was -- call it what you will -- elitist, hyper-serious, conservative -- the main thing conveyed was a rush having something deep to do with personal liberation, with an enviable, sensual, intellectuality, able to lay down long gorgeous verbal tracks. Rieff's writing, for all its social intelligence, lacked this quality.]

Kant once wrote that the genuine savage was not only unmoved by the sublime and the beautiful, but actively offended by it. Watching bored American tourists snarking at the sublime and beautiful art in the Louvre today, I was reminded of that line, and more amused than deeply offended. Both Rieff and Sontag would have been deeply offended: this is their charm and what can frustrate about their writings. But it's worth the frustration to read their works, preferably together.