In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag's Critical Modernism(Edinburgh Companions to Literature)

Reads modernism and theory through Susan Sontag's archive This adventurous critical inquiry into Sontag's archive illuminates the intimate link between modernism and theory while also providing a fascinating reintroduction to these two movements and concepts. Mena Mitrano explores three core ideas in this study: the confusion of terms between modernism and theory; the concept of an 'unwritten theory' suggested by Sontag's subterranean engagement with the foremost theorists of our time (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Jameson and others) in the rawness of her journals and notebooks; and Sontag's identity as a non-traditional philosopher, through the extraordinary discipleship to Walter Benjamin. The book is driven by new archival research and will have a multi-layered impact, changing our perception of Sontag as a post-Cold War public intellectual as well as interrogating key concepts in the Humanities. Key Features Original study of Susan Sontag's contribution to the development of critical thoughtOpens new avenues for research in the expanding field of new modernist studies and in the field of criticismDiscusses Sontag's collaboration with Walter Benjaminwhich reopens the question of the author and encourages an understanding of this concept from a psychoanalytic perspective, as a transgenerational phenomenonIncludes a discussion of the role of the American avant-garde in Sontag's abandonment of philosophy and in her turn to a pioneering, more theoretical literary criticism

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The archival relation; 1. Thoughts about Thinking: Approaching Sontag; 2. Aesthetic Experience and Critical Theory; 3. The Public Intellectual; 4. Modernism and Theory; 5. Iconologies; 6. Aura, Dread, and the Amateur; 7. Interlocution.

About the Author :
Mena Mitrano is Associate Professor of American literature and language in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research area is theoretical-critical thought, which she explores from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her work covers major critical theorists (Walter Benjamin), psychoanalysis (Ferenczi), great women thinkers (Hannah Arendt). She is the author of studies on Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag, major American women intellectuals who shaped the link between modernism and theory:Gertrude Stein: Woman Without Qualities (2005) and In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism (Edinburgh University Press 2016). She has written on language and literature and is interested in exploring literary/philosophical borders. She was educated at Rutgers University and has been a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Weissman Center for Leadership, Mount Holyoke College.

Review :
Mitrano attends closely to matters of perception and style with the effect of perforating, through the conjoined forces of the critical practice depicted and the one at work in this book, the narrow confines of theory that persist to this day. Sontag returns to us in this heartfelt, deeply thought, re-evaluation of her critical legacy and intellectual creativity. Mitrano illuminates Sontag's debt to the Frankfurt School and deconstruction in writing a new kind of criticism that is personal and full of culturual insights. An invaluable contribution to the new wave of Sontag scholarship. Sontag rarely wrote—at least not publically—about the grand masters of contemporary theory but thanks to Mitrano’s archival sleuthing, we now know that Sontag’s personal papers and marginalia display no such reticence. More than merely excavating these tantalizing nuggets of intellectual history, Mitrano deploys them to trace Sontag’s metamorphosis from a precocious student of philosophy into a great aesthetic voluptuary and public intellectual. Through detailed archival investigation and sensitive textual interpretation, In the Archive of Longing offers us a different Susan Sontag than we have seen previously: a Sontag with an unappreciated depth and breadth of engagement with major figures of European literary theory and philosophy.