O Susan Sontag pisze Joanna Mieszko-Wiórkiewicz — ...And the winner iiiiiiiiis...!
Joanna Mieszko-Wiórkiewicz writes about Susan Sontag: ...And the winner iiiiiiiis...!

Summary/Abstract: Susan Sontag, is an American intellectual of Polish-Jewish origin, an extremely controversial figure who was loved by some and abhorred by others and who after September 11 2001 was considered by many to be a traitor to her own nation. This was caused by her essay in the New York Times, in which the blade of accusation turned to the politics of the American Superpower and, most of all, by her cold-blooded conclusion: “If the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.” From then on she was stigmatised in her own country for her apparently anti-American standpoint. People started treating her attachment to European culture with an unconcealed hatred, regarding it as an unacceptable Europhilia that excluded patriotism. But not long before that, Susan Sontag had been regarded as a national ‘superstar’ whose spectacular writing career glowed in all kinds of environments where her ever-changing poses gave vent to her unfulfilled acting ambitions. And she herself would describe her changes of opinion as “so American”. Her last novel, In America, about the ups and downs in the emigration and love life of the Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska, won her the National Book Award for fiction in 2000. Her presence in bombed Hanoi during the Vietnam War was widely known and her portraits, appropriately styled by famous photographers, were on the covers of the most important magazines. And all her lectures had sell-out audiences. In her writing Susan Sontag “did not hesitate to surpass the limits between highbrow art and mass culture”. She was not afraid of dealing with complex issues like the condition of modern culture and interpretations of the conscious, art and illness. Her provocative works incited storms of criticism and her love life, which did not live up to the American puritan standard, was a constant cause of speculation. Her European character is now quietly at rest at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, unaccompanied by the scandal raging on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean …

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