Sontag, Bloody Sontag  

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In a well-circulated essay entitled "Sontag, Bloody Sontag," Camille Paglia describes her initial admiration for Susan Sontag and her subsequent disillusionment with the author. Paglia wrote,

"Sontag's cool exile was a disaster for the American women's movement. Only a woman of her prestige could have performed the necessary critique and debunking of the first instant-canon feminist screeds, such as those of Kate Millett or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women's studies from the start. No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own."

Paglia proceeds to detail a series of criticisms of Sontag, including Harold Bloom's comment on Paglia's doctoral dissertation, of "Mere Sontagisme!". This "had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing." Paglia also describes Sontag as a "sanctimonious moralist of the old-guard literary world". She told of a visit by Sontag to Bennington on October 4, 1973, in which she arrived hours late, ignored the agreed upon topic of the event, and made an incessant series of ridiculous demands.