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Susan Sontag
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Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays Paperback – November 9, 2002

by Susan Sontag (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars 30
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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.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    224 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Picador
  4. Publication date
    November 9, 2002
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9780312420086
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0312420086
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In this collection, Sontag masters all she chooses to survey. She is a noble appreciator. Integrity, wholeness, large-sighted vision are intrinsic to Sontag's care for the intellectual life....Under the Sign of Saturn includes two long articles that belong together: the famed, polemical, whipping of Leni Riefenstahl's laundered reputation and camp cult of fascist art, and her stunning analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany.... After this feast, I am eager for her thoughts on anything.” ―Chicago Sun-Times

“A self-described ‘besotted aesthete' and ‘obsessed moralist,' Sontag, more than most writers of her generation, views the everyday business of thinking and feeling as dialectical aspects of one another. Refining that sensibility while attending to the more provocative issues of the day, Sontag has created a body of work of exemplary merit.” ―The Boston Globe

“No one has written more passionately about Antonin Artaud....Nor has anyone before Sontag taken the pains to demolish so thoroughly Hitler's favorite moviemaker, Leni Riefenstahl. This is one of the crack essays in the book.” ―Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award for criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0312420080
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First Edition (November 9, 2002)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780312420086
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312420086
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.021 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 out of 5 stars 30

About the author

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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
3.8 out of 5
30 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Mary B Cantoral
5.0 out of 5 stars Sontag is Still Relevant
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2019
Susan Sontag’s insights are as valuable today as they were when she wrote them over forty years ago. I recommend that this book be accompanied by historian Dagmar Herzog’s edited collection of various scholars, Sexuality and German Fascism, which delves into that strange brew of political repression and sexual license. Also see Herbert Marcuse’s discussions on that which he termed, repressive desublimation.
4 people found this helpful
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Mary E. Sibley
5.0 out of 5 stars Self-analysis
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2004
This volume has been reread by me more than once. Sontag explains that her piece on Paul Goodman is being written in a small room in Paris. The author states she was not a friend of Goodman, although several of their worlds coincided with each other. She admired Goodman's work immensely. She describes his voice as cranky, egotistical, American. She finds him comparable, a unique voice, to D.H. Lawrence. Goodman wrote poetry, plays, novels, and social criticism. After the publication of GROWING UP ABSURD in 1960 Goodman was no longer an obscure writer. Sontag complains that he was often taken for granted, even by his admirers. She deems his amateurism identical with his genius.

Susan Sontag asserts that Antonin Artaud failed in his work and his life. His work consisted of a vast collection of fragments. Artaud described intellectual distress. He considered consciousness as process. A leading theme was the link between suffering and writing. All of Artaud's writing was in the first person. He welcomed Surrealism. Artaud's idea of revolution diverged from the Surrealists. He started in poetry. By 1926 in his search for the total art form, Artaud was doing theatrical work. Sontag holds that Artaud offers the greatest quantity of suffering in literature.

The author produces a devastating analysis of the pretensions of Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag's discussion of Alpine movie epics is engaging. Riefenstahl is identified with the Nazi era. Sontag contends that her pbotography book, THE LAST OF THE NUBA, completed thirty years after that era continued to exemplify Nazi ideology.

Walter Benjamin is the subject of the title essay. Benjamin found Saturnine elements in Baudelaire, Proust, Karl Kraus, and even Goethe. To him, subject to melancholy, solitutde appeared to be the fit state of man. Benjamin collected emblem books. His relations with others were complex, veiled. Benjamin felt an affinity to the baroque and the Surreal. He had a microscopic gaze. Benjamin was a wanderer and a collector. By miniaturizing things they became portable. Benjamin wrote that the melancholic permits himself the pleasure of allegory. His characteristic form was the essay.

The piece on Elias Canetti stresses the writer's acquisition of languages. German became the language of his mind. As a child he had spoken Ladino. He had a taste for fanciful blends of knowledge. Canetti was rather close to Freud in technique and interests, but not Freudian. Sontag describes CROWDS AND POWER as an eccentric book.

The essays in this volume are both serious and lively.
14 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Just no a fan.
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2016
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Just not a fan.
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jafrank
5.0 out of 5 stars Susan kills it, as usual
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2012
Sontag, as ever, manages to craft writings of remarkable intellectual range and depth on pretty much anything she focuses. Under the Sign of Saturn feels a bit darker than some of her other books I've read, in so far is a lot of the essays focus on (both directly and implicity) fascism and its broad appeal and continued resonance in the arts and culture of the post-war era. I think the best thing I can say about these is that even when you have no exposure to the works of people she writes about (I for one don't know the first thing about Antonin Artaud Elias Canetti or Hans Syberberg) she still manages to spin out so many dazzlingly smart observations that they are absolutely worth your time. Sontag makes you passionate about everything she's passionate about. And there seems to be very little that she isn't passionate about
2 people found this helpful
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Steiner
4.0 out of 5 stars Very Fine
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2006
Sontag has once again compiled an intelligent collection of essays on widely varying aesthetic topics. Though she begins with a rather artificial and patronizing obituary for the late man of letters Paul Goodman, whose body of work she is evidently less than enthused with, though she feels obliged to compare him to Sartre. The essay rings of false piety.

She moves into an expansive and favorable essay on Antonin Artaud, the great playwright and artist of the avant-garde movement. Sontag reviews the developments of his great career within the context of moralistic philosophic aesthetics, liking him with Nietzsche, then Sade, then Breton.

Yet the most impressive essay in Under the Sign is titled `Fascinating Fascism,' and it is truly fascinating. In it, Sontag overviews the work of filmmaker, actress, and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist whose body of work includes the esteemed documentaries Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, the latter about the 1936 Olympic games. Sontag reviews Riefenstahl's book of photography on the Nuba tribe in Sudan, which is apparently breathtaking. Sontag concludes that Reifenstahl, despite her `de-Nazification' and renunciation of her political past is still enamored with a fascist ideal, valuing the masculine strength of the male Nuba and placing their bodies in the foreground, while the women remain vulnerable and tucked away in shadowy corners. The essay is highly provocative.

The title essay is about the great philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, whom she reviews favorably. This essay provides some interesting tidbits of information that Hannah Arendt neglects to include in her introduction, such as Benjamin's apparent hatred for Heidegger's philosophy.

Also included in this volume is an excellent and terse review of Roland Barthes, and the fine novelist Elias Canetti, whom she holds in great esteem.
10 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Entrega rápida
Reviewed in Brazil on February 7, 2022
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Entrega rápida em perfeito estado.
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Rajesh
5.0 out of 5 stars A great mind's work
Reviewed in India on November 10, 2023
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Sontag's work is the model of the intellectual's vocation.
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Daniel Wolpert
2.0 out of 5 stars Printed on Toilet paper.
Reviewed in Germany on November 4, 2023
Verified Purchase
This is a classic volume by all accounts and as to the literary and cultural content I have little to add. But the two stars are reserved for the material quality of the book itself. It's printed on the possibly lowest grade of paper that just about holds the weight of ink. The coarse paper means that the print on it is often blurred and obscured. I am sure the reason for this paper and print quality will be touted as being somehow sustainable resource management and not gouging the customer for profit margins to pay for the profligate lifestyles of shareholders. But perhaps it is a lesson I must learn: buy secondhand. The print quality will be better and the environment not burdened further. It's a decent book of Sonntag's essays from the 1970s and 1980 and deserves better than this woeful quality from "penguin classics".
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