Illness as Metaphor

This annotation is part of a group project in which we went through a specific section of the late Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor."

p. 73:  “In La Triviata, as soon as Alfredo wins Violetta’s love, the moves her from unhealthy wicked Paris to the wholesome countryside….”

“La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La dame aux Camélias (1852), a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The title "La traviata" means literally The Woman Gone Astray, or perhaps more figuratively, The Fallen Woman. It was originally entitled Violetta, after the main character,” reports Wikipedia.



Frank Lloyd Wright
Photo from bolender.com



p. 73:  “In The Living City (1958), Frank Lloyd Wright compared the city of earlier times, a healthy organism….”

Frank Lloyd Wright, famous for the house, Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania was a well-known American architect.  The Living City is one of his later works, published the year before he died, according to Wikipedia.

p. 74:  “Bichat in 1800 defined life as ‘the ensemble of functions which resists death.’”

Marie François Xavier Bichat “(November 14, 1771 – July 22, 1802), French anatomist and physiologist, was born at Thoirette (Jura).  Bichat is best remembered as the father of modern histology and pathology. Despite the fact that he worked without a microscope he was able to advance greatly the understanding of the human body. He was the first to introduce the notion of tissue (tissues) as distinct entities. He maintained that diseases attacked tissues rather than whole organs” (Wikipedia).

p. 75:  “In 1916, in ‘Socialism and Culture,’ Gramsci denounced….”

Gramsci, an Italian politician and philosopher, according to Wikipedia, was involved with the Communist Party of Italy and was put in prison by a member of the Fascist movement, according to Wikipedia.

p. 75:  “In 1919, Mandelstam paid the following tribute to Pasternak: To read…”
Osip Mandelstam “was a Soviet poet and essayist,” according to Wikipedia.  Poetry of his was in Tenishevsky school’s almanac.
Boris Pasternak “was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian and Soviet poet of Jewish descent, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In Russia, Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is one of the most influential collections of poetry published in the Russian language in the 20th century. In the West he is best known for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, a tragedy whose events span the last period of the Russian Empire and the early days of the Soviet Union. It was first translated and published in Italy in 1957. He helped give birth to the dissident movement with the publication of Doctor Zhivago,” reports Wikipedia.

p. 75:  “And Marinetti, denouncing Communism in 1920: Communism is the exasperation of the bureaucratic cancer that has always wasted humanity.”
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian writer, fathered the Futurist faction, reports Wikipedia.

p. 76:  “…from Plato to, say, Hobbes…”
Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher and “a champion of absolutism for the sovereign,” maintains Wikipedia.

p. 78:  “In 1708, Lord Shaftesbury wrote:….”
Lord Shaftesbury (a.k.a. Earl of Shaftesbury) in context, is likely “Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury” (Wikipedia) who “was an English politician, philosopher and writer....  Shaftesbury's amiability of character seems to have been one of his principal characteristics. Like Locke he had a peculiar pleasure in bringing forward young men. Among these may be especially mentioned Michael Ainsworth, a native of Wimborne St Giles, the young man who was the recipient of the Letters addressed to a student at the university, and was maintained by Shaftesbury at University College, Oxford,” says Wikipedia.