Susan Sontag

The author of "Illness as Metaphor," Susan Sontag, plays an important role in the text. She has a strong authorial presence - although she rarely uses the ‘I’ pronoun, she writes in a subjective style that emphasizes her own perceptions and arguments. Throughout the text, Sontag subtly hints at her anger and frustration over the prevalence of stigmatizing metaphors to describe illness. She blends her academic analysis with this overarching sense of frustration in order to both thematically and tonally establish her critique of disease metaphors.

Sontag was a prominent intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s. She published several influential books of cultural criticism and commentary which analyzed books, articles, artwork, and politics both from her own time and from the nineteenth century. She was strongly critical of modern culture (particularly conservative politics and the Vietnam War). Her writing style generally is consistent with her style...