preview

Susan Sontag's Camp

Decent Essays

In Notes on “Camp,” Susan Sontag cites fifty-eight characteristics of “camp sensibility.” She says the ultimate statement Camp statement is, “it’s good because it’s awful …Of course one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes-” the sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility of taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies – which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period (Sontag, 11). Honestly there are so many characteristics of “camp sensibility”

Get Access