962 reviews for:

Notes on Camp

Susan Sontag

3.9 AVERAGE

challenging informative slow-paced

I thought I knew what "camp" meant...
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10.
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

30.
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

31
This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment— or arouses a necessary sympathy.

Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.

41.
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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 my fav quotes:
"Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human—in short, another valid sensibility—is being revealed."

"Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” "

i wish sontag lived long enough to watch glee
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challenging informative medium-paced

the notion that titus andronicus is camp gagged me she's so real
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funny informative inspiring lighthearted reflective fast-paced