Writer/feminist Susan Sontag next at Open VISIONS Forum | Press Releases

Leading American writer/feminist/activist Susan Sontag will share her views and discuss her new book, In America , at Fairfield University's next Open VISIONS Forum, Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 7:30 p.m., in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. Sontag's topic is "A Writer's Responsibility: Fiction and History."

One of America's best known and most admired authors, Sontag was called by The New Republic , "a writer from whom it is continually possible to learn." In addition to her recently released In America , she has penned three other novels, a collection of stories and six collections of essays. Her works have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, Art in America and Granta .

Sontag has also written and directed four feature-length films and directed plays here and in Europe, including "Waiting for Godot" in Sarajevo in 1993. Her many awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim fellowships and two Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a former president of the international writers' organization.

Sontag did undergraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago where she received her bachelor's degree; she also did graduate work at Harvard and Oxford universities. She has taught philosophy, the history of religion and literature at Harvard College, the City College of New York, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research and Brown University.

"Politics and the Arts" is Sontag's analysis of our cultural and ethical situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century when so many features of the private and the political have been radically transformed by the values and the practices of the consumer society. She has been a human rights activist for more than two decades. An early and outspoken critic of the international community's failure to halt the genocide in Bosnia, Sontag spent much time in besieged Sarajevo from 1993 through 1996.

The Open VISIONS Forum, a program of Fairfield University's School of Continuing Education, is sponsored in part by Advest and presented in cooperation with the Women's Studies program, an interdisciplinary minor in the college of Arts and Sciences. Ticket prices vary for each lecture. Tickets for the Sontag lecture are $15 and $12 for seniors. For tickets or information call the Quick Center box office at (203) 254-4010 or toll-free at 1-877-ARTS-396.