Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Susan Sontag’s In America. Most of the episode concerns the aesthetic, political, and personal peregrinations of Sontag’s “exemplary” 20th-century life: her changing beliefs about American culture and American power and her move from radicalism to liberalism; her concomitant abandonment of aesthetic extremism in favor of a more measured novelistic humanism; her thoughts about the conflict between the intellectual and the artist, the essay and the novelist; and more. Then we measure her final novel, In America, against these ideas and against her own high ambitions. Whether you’ve read In America or not, this episode should serve as a thorough and entertaining introduction to the one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall; I have also included, as a bonus, the slideshow for my earlier lecture on Sontag as mentioned in the episode:
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