The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, said her son, David Rieff. Sontag had been ill with cancer intermittently for 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her best-known books, the critical study “Illness as Metaphor” (1978).
A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960s, Sontag was the author of four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories. She was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades, her work was discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the Hollywood movie “Bull Durham.” Her best-known books - all published by Farrar, Straus Giroux - include the novels “Death Kit” (1967), “The Volcano Lover” (1992) and “In America” (2000); the essay collections “Against Interpretation” (1966), “Styles of Radical Will” (1969) and “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1982); the critical studies “On Photography” (1977) and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” (1989); and the short-story collection “I, Etcetera” (1978).
Her most recent book, published last year, was “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. One of her last published essays, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” was written in response to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison.
Sontag’s writing marked a radical break with traditional postwar criticism. She advocated a sensualist approach to the study of art, championed aesthetic form over content and - most subversive - gleefully blurred the boundaries between high and low culture.
Learned, thoughtful, deeply cerebral, often provocative, her work repeatedly explored the transcendent experience of making, and looking at, contemporary art, with its jagged edges and attendant themes of alienation and despair. She was concerned throughout her career with sensation, in both meanings of the word.
“What Susan did was, she dealt as a literary and philosophical intellectual with the deep problems of human life in our times,” Arthur Danto, the Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia and an art critic for The Nation, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “She was never a dispassionate or disinterested writer. She always used her own experience as a way of giving meaning to issues that had meaning for everybody.”
Unlike most serious intellectuals, Sontag was also a popular celebrity, partly because of her striking, telegenic appearance, partly because of her outspoken, at times inflammatory, public statements. Over the decades, her image - strong features, wide mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned in later years with a sweeping streak of white - became an instantly recognisable part of 20th-century popular culture.
Trained in literature and philosophy, Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Sontag became an evangelist for the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her - a radical stance at the time.
For Sontag, “culture” encompassed a vast, potentially limitless, landscape. She wrote serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema and science fiction, that earlier critics had disdained. She produced impassioned essays on the (mostly French) writers and filmmakers she admired, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard. Her work, with its emphasis on the jagged-edged and the here-and-now, helped make the study of popular culture a respectable academic pursuit.
What united Sontag’s output was a propulsive desire to define the forces - aesthetic, moral, political - that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she hoped to understand what it meant to be human in the waning years of the 20th century.
To many observers, Sontag’s work was bold and thrilling. Interviewed in The New York Times magazine in 1992, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes compared Sontag with the Renaissance humanist Erasmus. “This is one of the worst-informed eras in history, just like the beginning of the 15th century,” he said. “Countries are ignorant about each other. And, like Erasmus, exactly when it is needed, Susan Sontag is a communicator in this broken-down world. Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing. Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate.”
Other critics were less enthralled. Some branded Sontag an unoriginal thinker, a populariser with a gift for aphorism who could boil down difficult writers for mass consumption. (Irving Howe called her “a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother’s patches.”) Some regarded her tendency to revisit her earlier, often controversial, positions as ambivalent. Some saw her scholarly approach to popular art forms as pretentious. (Sontag once remarked that she could appreciate Patti Smith because she had read Nietzsche.) She had a knack - or perhaps a penchant - for getting into trouble. She could be provocative to the point of being inflammatory, as when she championed the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in a 1965 essay (she would revise her position some years later); celebrated the communist societies of Cuba and North Vietnam (just as provocatively, she later denounced communism as a form of fascism); and, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, wrote in The New Yorker, “Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.” (International Herald Tribune)
