SOURCE: "That Sontag Woman," in The New Criterion, Vol. 11, No. 1, September, 1992, pp. 30-7.

In the essay below, Bawer discusses cultural elitism in Sontag's works, focusing on her novel The Volcano Lover.

In these times when charges of cultural elitism are routinely hurled by East Village poets at their formalist rivals, by au courant English professors at champions of the literary canon, and by the vice president of the United States at Hollywood producers, it seems particularly appropriate to ponder the career of Susan Sontag, who has for decades been the very apotheosis of a certain kind of cultural elitist. To be sure, the cultural elitist—if by those words one simply means a lover and defender of high culture—is at present perhaps the most precious and imperiled species in the artistic and intellectual bestiary. But Susan Sontag is the sort of cultural elitist for whom the term...