Unit12SocialCriticwithNerve.docVIP

Unit 12 Social Critic with Verve 充满活力的社会批评家 verve：an energetic style；vitality That magazine has a lot of verve. 那个杂志办得很有生气。The audience rose to his verve and wit. 观众们对他生气勃勃和富于机智的表演热烈喝彩。 Susan Sontag （1933~2004） Novelist, essayist and critic. A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960s, Ms. Sontag wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades her work was part of the contemporary canon作品, discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the pages of popular magazines to the Hollywood movie. Ms. Sontags work made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. The theme that runs through Susans writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and an old friend of Ms. Sontags, said Ms. Sontags best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus Giroux, include the novels Death Kit (1967)《死亡匣子》, The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000); the essay collections Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969)《激进意志的样式》and Under the Sign of Saturn (1980)《在土星的标志下》; the critical studies On Photography (1977) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989); and the short-story collection I, Etcetera (1978)《我，及其他》. One of her most famous works, however, was not a book, but an essay, Notes on Camp, published in 1964 and still widely read. Widely regarded as one of the leading American intellectuals, Susan Sontag helped shape modern American thinking for nearly half a century. Read the following and know more about Ms. Sontag. Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1933, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. Her father was a fur trader in China, and her mother joined him there for long periods, leaving Sus