Ler os outros: O Orbituário de Susan Sontag no Economist

Segue, abaixo, um excerto:

IT IS hard to be an intellectual in the United States. In France, a wizened man or woman in a black beret, smoking unfiltered Gitanes and with a copy of Sartre's “La nausée” in his pocket, is considered a national treasure. Reverent circles form around him in cafés. When he wishes to muse about the existentialist paradigm, he is given a double-page spread in Le Monde. His brief but seminal work, “Fifi et le nouvel hermeneutique”, wins the Prix Goncourt and is seen being read on the Métro.

In America, by contrast, intellectuals are mocked as “pointy-heads” and “nattering nabobs”. They are a tiny, struggling species, whose habitat is confined to a few uptown apartments in New York and the faculties of certain universities. There they swap thin, sad monographs on self-image and the role of gender in criticism, or vice versa, while Oprah Winfrey is hailed on national TV as the arbiter of literary taste.

Susan Sontag therefore achieved the near-impossible: she was a European-style intellectual in America, and many Americans had both heard of her, and read her books. Moreover, she wrote clearly and well, in short words and short sentences that were blessedly free of the tech-tosh that passes for English in most haunts of intellectualism. Educated Americans were delighted to find someone who had not only read Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti, as somehow they felt they ought to every time they opened the New York Review of Books, but who could tell them what those guys were talking about, and whether they were any good.