"Notes on "Camp"" is a well-known essay by Susan Sontag organized around fifty-eight numbered theses. It was published in 1964 and was the author's first contribution to the Partisan Review. The essay created a literary sensation and brought Sontag her first brush with intellectual notoriety. It was published in 1966 in book form in Sontag's debut collection of essays, Against Interpretation (ISBN 0312280866).
The essay codified and mainstreamed the cultural connotations of the word camp, and identified camp's evolution as a distinct aesthetic phenomenon.
Sontag says there is a "peculiar relation of Camp taste with homosexuality". Homosexuals, through aesthetics, and Jews, through ethics, have shaped the modern sensibility, according to Sontag. "The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."
Read more about Notes On "Camp": Quotations
Famous quotes containing the words notes and/or camp:
“I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)