Abstract
This paper joins a discussion about the representational dissonance and commemorative ethics of two self-referential works that engage with Susan Sontag’s 2004 death from Myelodysplastic Syndrome: Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life1990–2005 (2006) and David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008). Instead of approaching these two texts as testimonial accounts measured by standards of reliability and grace, this paper considers how the temporal dissonance produced by an incurable cancer diagnosis thwarts questions of personhood and ethical intention in Leibovitz’s photography and Rieff ’s prose. By contextualizing these works as the caregivers’ experience of Sontag’s illness, this paper reads them as attempts at gauging two distinct temporal perspectives that confound identification—those of living through and of remembering terminal time.
Highlights
This paper joins a discussion about the representational dissonance and commemorative ethics of two self-referential works that engage with Susan Sontag’s 2004 death from Myelodysplastic
In her essay on Leibovitz and Rieff’s memoirs entitled “Cancer Narratives and an Ethics of Commemoration” Mary DeShazer gives the following breakdown of the photos in Leibovitz’s book: “Of the 341 images contained in the book, which Leibovitz calls “a memoir in photographs,” more than two-thirds are personal, and approximately a hundred of these depict Sontag”
The aim of this article is to contribute to these discussions by considering how the temporal dissonance produced by an incurable cancer diagnosis thwarts questions of personhood and ethical intention in Leibovitz’s pictures and Rieff’s prose
Summary
This paper joins a discussion about the representational dissonance and commemorative ethics of two self-referential works that engage with Susan Sontag’s 2004 death from Myelodysplastic.
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