Susan Sontag as Pulic Intellectual. A course in the New Intellectual Writing project at Davidson. | CIS 101W | Scott Denham | Carolina Inn 100 | hours M – F 9 – 11 & appt.

Overview. Class of 2013 students are invited to enroll in one of eight W courses offered through Religion, English, Philosophy, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. These courses together form the “New Intellectual Writing Project” at Davidson, a special set of courses highlighting the ways in which scholarly discussions about science and culture are made available to wide audiences beyond the academy. The courses focus on such questions as: What are the responsibilities of intellectuals to communicate their ideas to non-specialist readers? What public roles have intellectual writers embraced in the past, and, given digital media, what new roles might they assume in the future? What are the strengths and limits of intellectual work in the public sphere? What are the challenges of producing prose that is innovative, nuanced, and clear?

The project values all Davidson students as new intellectuals, persons who are smart, articulate, and interested in honing their skills as strong thinkers and critical writers. To foster those talents, students who enroll in the eight courses will be given opportunities to experiment with various public roles as writers. Because the eight courses share certain reading and writing assignments, students will have some of their work-in-progress reviewed by colleagues enrolled in New Intellectual Writing classes beyond their own course. This gives students the experience of having their work read by other students and faculty personally unknown to them, but interested in their positions and ideas, and eager to respond. We believe that students will find this more public role for writers both challenging and invigorating.

In contemporary American culture, the term “intellectual” has a conflicted status. On the one hand, many citizens value intellectual work as creative, critical, and forward-thinking. On the other hand, intellectuals have been (we think unfairly) considered to be elitist, or self-interested, and therefore unapproachable. The New Intellectual Writing Project maintains that intellectual writers hold an important place in our culture as writers who value the democratic function of accessible and smart prose, and aim to foster robust and sophisticated conversations among citizens on scientific, social, political, ethical, and aesthetic issues that should matter to all of us.

Our course. What is a public intellectual? How do public intellectuals arise; what are their positions; how do they argue or influence the public; how do they bring about change or reflect and represent status? What are their concerns, and why? These and other questions will motivate our study of the work of Susan Sontag (1933-2004), the preeminent American intellectual of the last generation. Sontag was above all an essayist, but also wrote novels, plays, and directed films. Sontag’s work is, at heart, about aesthetics: how we understand the arts, how the arts work, what the arts can and should do in our lives. But at the same time, art for Sontag is always about explaining human experience, and writing about art is always writing about the human experience, be that love, illness, war, beauty, or the realm of ideas.

Writing for Sontag is a process of engagement and change. Referring to essays in her first collection, Against Interpretation (1966), she wrote in the preface to that volume: “Before I wrote the essays, I did not believe many of the ideas espoused in them; when I wrote them, I believed what I wrote; subsequently, I have come to disbelieve some of the same ideas again—but from a new perspective, one that incorporates and is nourished by what is true in the argument of the essays. Writing criticism has proved to be an act of intellectual dismemberment as much as of intellectual self-expression” (viii). We will look at Sontag’s work of literary, film, and cultural criticism in Against Interpretation, Under the Sign of Saturn, Where the Stress Falls, and At the Same Time, and move to her work on illness in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Then, we’ll look at her essays On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. Finally, we’ll consider her short stories in I, etcetera and two of her her novels, Volcano Lover and In America. In all these works we will seek out the arguments Sontag makes at the level of the text, that is, in the sense of working through a clear philosophical and rhetorical position on the page; but we will also find the arguments she is making more broadly about life, politics, sex, war, and art; we will see how and why these arguments do change and grow over time; and we will seek to understand how public intellectuals like George Orwell, Rachel Carson, and Sontag act in the world.

Managing things. Blackboard sites: Go to Blackboard (http://blackboard.davidson.edu). Find our class site. Also find the NIW site. There are two Bb sites, one for just us (class site, which we won’t use much, I expect) and one for the whole NIW project (all 8 sections of us, which we will use a lot). E-reserve: Go to e-reserve: Library / Course reserves / connect / log in / find Denham CIS101W/ get texts. Style guides: We’ll use MLA style this semester. Use MLA style for all your writing in the course. (Lipson’s Doing Honest Work contains MLA style guidelines, as do lots of other books.) Honor code: Acknowledge your debts and influences. See the pledge here. Grades: Frame Assignment (Parts 1 & 2) 10%; Project 1 (Orwell) = 15%; Project 2 (Sontag 1) = 20%; Project 3 (Carson) = 20%; Project 4 (Sontag 2) = 20%; Participation, engagement = 15%. Attendance policy: No absences. In case of illness, crisis, death in the family, or other excusable absences, let me know before class. Unexcused absences cost a letter grade each for the semester. For sports, field trips, honor council obligations, or other qualified (so-called excused) potential absences I may choose to reschedule the class for that day, probably in the late evening or early morning. Please let me know right away about any qualified absences. Note that your reporting on any absences falls under the guidelines of the honor code. Pledge all your work in this course by signing or typing your name.

Texts:

In the bookstore

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. (1962). Boston: Mariner Books, 2002.

Lipson, Charles. Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. 2nd Ed. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2008.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. NY: Picador, 2001. 978-0312280864.

—. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. NY: Picador, 2008. ISBN: 978-0312426712.

—. Conversations with Susan Sontag. Ed. Leland Pogue. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 978-0878058341.

—. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. NY: Picador, 2001. 978-0312420130

—. In America. NY: Picador, 2001. 978-0312273200

—. On Photography. NY: Picador, 2001. 978-0312420093.

—. Regarding the Pain of Others. NY: Picador, 2001. 978-0312422196.

—. Volcano Lover. NY: Picador, 2004. 978-0312420079

Szanto, Andras. What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics. NY: Public Affairs, 2007. 1586485601

On e-reserve in the library

Diamond, Edwin. “The Myth of ‘The Pesticide Menace’.” Dunlap, Thomas R., Ed. DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism. Seattle: U Washington P, 2005: 106-111.

Gartner, Carol B. “When Science Writing Becomes Literary Art: The Success of Silent Spring.” Wendell, Craig, Ed. And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000: 103-125.

Jacobi, Daniel and Bernard Schiele. “Science in Magazines, and Its Readers.” Public Understanding of Science. 2(1993): 3-20.

Lutts, Ralph. “Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement.” Environmental Review 9(1985): 210-225.

Murphy, Priscilla Coit. “Silent Spring and Its Contexts: ‘The Right to Know’.” Murphy, Priscilla Coit. What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring. Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 2005: 2-18.

—. “Opposition: ‘How Do you Fight a Best-Seller?’.” Murphy, Priscilla Coit. What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring. Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 2005: 89-118.

Norwood, Vera L. “The Nature of Knowing: Rachel Carson and the American Environment.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 12(1987): 740-760.

Poole, Steven. “Terror.” Poole, Smith. Unspeak: How Words Became Weapons, How Weapons Became Words, and How that Message Becomes Reality. New York: Grove Press, 2006: 126-162.

Wang, Zuoyue. “Responding to Silent Spring: Science, Popular Science Communication, and Environmental Policy in the Kennedy Years.” Science Communication. 19(1997): 141-163.

Schedule (Details will get filled in as the semester progresses.)

week	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
1	Aug 24	Aug 25	Aug 26	Aug 27	Aug 28
	Welcome. Introductions. Sontag intro. Course intro. View for Wednesday: Start here. Lions & Cannibals I and II (Sontag joins in about 3:30 in II); Sontag and Phillip Johnson; Four interviews with Charlie Rose. (about two hours total) Read for Wednesday “Against Interpretation” and “A note and some acknowledgements” in Against Interpretation and Leland Pogue, “Introduction” in Conversations with Susan Sontag. Browse around a bit, too, in those interviews. Frame Assignment Part 1. Read Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”		Discussion: Sontag, “Against Interpretation” Orwell intro (not). Read for Friday “On Style” in Against Interpretation. Write your Frame essay!	Pleanary Session in Tyler –Tallman Hall, 6:30 – 7:30pm.	Frame essays uploaded to NIW Blackboard (NIW-Bb). View for Monday, ifyou want: Hitchens on Orwell; more Hitchens on Orwell, parts one and two (but these without the stupid illustrations, just audio is better).
2	Aug 31	Sept 1	Sept 2	Sept 3	Sept 4
Project 1 Orwell	Begin discussions of Orwell and his responders. Orwell close reading. Find Sontag on Orwell. Copy, cite, bring to class Wed.		Orwell close readings, continued. Sontag on Orwell. Responses to Orwell for Monday. (Assign summaries.)		No class meeting.
3	Sept 7	Sept 8	Sept 9	Sept 10	Sept 11
Project 1 Orwell	Responses to Orwell. Summaries.		Responses to Orwell, continued.		Project 1 draft due, 5pm, uploaded to NIW-Bb. Review peer drafts for Monday. Read for Monday: Sontag, “9.11.01,” “A Few Weeks After,” and “One Year After” in At the Same Time.
4	Sept 14	Sept 15	Sept 16	Sept 17	Sept 18
Project 1 Orwell	Reviewed drafts returned via NIW-Bb. Discuss this. Sontag on 9/11.		Project 1 talk.		Project 1 paper due 5pm. Re-read for Monday: “On Style” and “Against Interpretation” plus read one essay from each of parts II, III, and IV in Against Interpretation.
5	Sept 21	Sept 22	Sept 23	Sept 24	Sept 25
Project 2 Sontag as Essayist	Sontag and the essay; discussions of essays in Against Interpretation. Read for Wednesday “Notes on Camp” in Against Interpretation.		Sontag, essays. Trends. Camp. Read for Friday “What’s Happening in America?” and “Trip to Hanoi” in Styles of Radical Will.		Sontag 1966 and 1968. Read for Monday “Fascinating Facism,” “Under the Sign of Saturn,” and “Syberberg’s Hitler” in Under the Sign of Saturn. Topics for project 2.
6	Sept 28	Sept 29	Sept 30	Oct 1	Oct 2
Project 2 Sontag as Essayist	Sontag on Riefenstahl, Benjamin, Syberberg and Hitler. Topics. Read for Wednesday Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.		Discuss metaphors.		Project 2 draft due 5pm. Read for Monday On Photography.
7	Oct 5	Oct 6	Oct 7	Oct 8	Oct 9
Project 2 Sontag as Essayist	Discuss On Photography. Read for Wednesday Regarding the Pain of Others.		Discuss Regarding. Read for Friday “A Photograph is not an Opinion. Or is it?” and two more essays from the section “Seeing” in Where the Stress Falls and “Photography, a Little Summa” and “Regarding the Torture of Others” in At the Same Time. (5 total, but fairly brief essays this time)		Open discussion of project 2 papers.
8	Oct 12	Oct 13	Oct 14	Oct 15	Oct 16
Project 3 Carson	No class, fall break	Fall break	Project 2 paper due 5pm. Project 3, begin Carson.	Plenary Session 6:30, Lilly Gallery in Chambers.	Carson
9	Oct 19	Oct 20	Oct 21	Oct 22	Oct 23
Project 3 Carson	Carson		Library Session.		Carson
10	Oct 26	Oct 27	Oct 28	Oct 29	Oct 30
Project 3 Carson	Carson		Carson	Plenary Session 6:30, Lilly Gallery in Chambers.	Project 3 draft due posted to NIW-Bb for peer review.
11	Nov 2	Nov 3	Nov 4	Nov 5	Nov 6
Project 3 Carson	Project 3 drafts with peer responses posted to NIW-Bb.		Carson		Carson
12	Nov 9	Nov 10	Nov 11	Nov 12	Nov 13
Project 4 Sontag as Intellectual	Project 3 final paper due. Read for Wednesday Sontag, selected stories in I, etcetera.		Sontag, selected stories in I, etcetera.		Sontag, selected stories in I, etcetera. Read for Monday Sontag, Volcano Lover, Prologue and Part One.
13	Nov 16	Nov 17	Nov 18	Nov 19	Nov 20
	Sontag, Volcano Lover. Read for Wednesday Part Two.		Sontag, Volcano Lover.		Sontag, Volcano Lover.
14	Nov 23	Nov 24	Nov 25	Nov 26	Nov 27
	Project 4 draft due Read for next Monday Sontag In America.		No class	Thanksgiving	No class
15	Nov 30	Dec 1	Dec 2	Dec 3	Dec 4
	Project 4 drafts returned. Sontag In America.		Sontag In America.	Plenary Session 6:30pm Tyler-Tallman.	Project 4 paper due 5pm.
16	Dec 7	Dec 8	Dec 9	Dec 10	Dec 11
	Frame Essay 2 assignment distributed.		Last class day Evaluations Summing up	Reading Day	Frame Essay 2 due, posted to NIW-Bb.
17	Dec 14	Dec 15	Dec 16	Dec 17	Dec 18