Literature
The first post-World War II use of the word in print, marginally mentioned in the Sontag essay, may be Christopher Isherwood's 1954 novel The World in the Evening, where he comments: "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance." In American writer Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'", Sontag emphasised artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness and shocking excess as key elements of camp. Examples cited by Sontag included Tiffany lamps, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake and Japanese science fiction films such as Rodan, and The Mysterians of the 1950s.
In Mark Booth's 1983 book Camp he defines camp as "to present oneself as being committed to the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits." He discerns carefully between genuine camp and camp fads and fancies, things that are not intrinsically camp, but display artificiality, stylisation, theatricality, naivety, sexual ambiguity, tackiness, poor taste, stylishness, or portray camp people and thus appeal to them. He considers Susan Sontag's definition problematical because it lacks this distinction.
Read more about this topic: Camp (style)
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)