Susan Sontag Essay

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If Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is akin to a bel canto diva, moving her voice in ornate, wispy, origami shapes with very little forcefulness--without, in keeping with the classic test of bel canto mastery, "bending the flame" (which could account for the "thinness" my professor once complained of as we discussed Sedgwick's buoyantly clever and even hallucinatory "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," a psychotic triumph that proves you can read your own erotomania between the lines of a text and "get off," as it were, or "get by")--then Sontag is akin to a Broadway belter in the Ethel Merman or Patti LuPone tradition: all forcefulness, her every phrase canon-packed and released at a hair-whipping, face-flattening full blast (Stark 105). If you read her in the afternoon, you must cancel your evening plans to get the knots out of your hair.
An appreciation of Marilyn Vos Savant's persona is only possible if one seeks out and watches one of the YouTube videos of her TV appearances from the 80s. In seeking an analogue for this persona, I remembered Camille Paglia's dissection of the "English epicene" from Sexual Personae. This is the persona that Susan Sontag cultivated so well, although with considerably more theatricality. Vos Savant achieves her superior social positioning, her regal mystery and somewhat stuffy glamour, through a calculated limiting of rhetorical, gestural, and expressive range. Nothing, not even personality, should distract from the intellect. My favorite Vos Savant performance is …show more content…

Language in The Importance of Being Earnest is a mode of hierarchical placement. It is a series of psychodramatic gestures, each remark asserting a caste location vis-a-vis some other person or class of person. The speakers are constantly positioning themselves at fixed distances from others. (Sexual Personae 544; original

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