Susan Sontag: "Make Something Better" episode artwork

EPISODE · Oct 24, 2019 · 19 MIN

Susan Sontag: "Make Something Better"

from Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives · host Toronto Public Library

Works by Susan SontagFrom AmericaThe Volcano LoverTuesday, and After: New Yorker Writers Respond to 9/11 (New Yorker article from Sep 2001)Regarding the Pain of OthersDebriefing: Collected Stories Works about Susan SontagSontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin MoserRobert Fulford: A Sojourn With Susan Sontag (National Post article from 2012)Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone InterviewSusan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber Other Related Books or MaterialsTheatre of War by Lewis Lapham About the HostNovelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017. Music is by Yuka From the ArchivesWriters Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations. Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

Susan Sontag: Part Four: “Make Something Better” In this part, the last of four, Sontag considers earlier words of hers about the religion of profitability in the USA and how it underpins all of American society. She talks about the important distinction between imagining a utopian society vs simply working towards something better from the lives of her characters in From America. And she reflects on how hesitant she is to imagine and speak for the country of Canada, a settler nation to use the parlance of the time, in a far less complex and fraught pre-911 world.

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Susan Sontag: "Make Something Better"

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This episode is 19 minutes long.

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This episode was published on October 24, 2019.

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Works by Susan SontagFrom AmericaThe Volcano LoverTuesday, and After: New Yorker Writers Respond to 9/11 (New Yorker article from Sep 2001)Regarding the Pain of OthersDebriefing: Collected Stories Works about Susan SontagSontag: Her Life and Work by...

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