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WebLinks: Contexts for Exploring Visual and Verbal Texts |
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Chapter 5 - Moving Pictures |
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After reading more about pacifism, World War I, and the history of war photography, you will have a broader context for understanding Sontag's essay. After browsing over the PBS site on war photography, for example, you may come to quite different conclusions than Sontag about its ethical dimensions. Do you think it's ethical to show graphic images of war in the mass media? Why? Is it still possible to be a pacifist?
http://www.susansontag.com/
When Susan Sontag died in December 2004, newspapers around the world acknowledged her as one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. She wrote novels, memoirs, essays, reviews and articles for America's leading publications, like the New Yorker and Harper's. She has written about politics, war, illness, art, among other issues. You can learn more about her on this site, run by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwone/index.shtml
World War I looms large in Sontag's essay. After the war ended in 1918, a lot people called it "the war to end all wars." Of course, an even bloodier war broke out about twenty years later. Still, WWI is a transformative event in Western Civilization; indeed, many people wondered whether such a thing as "civilization" even existed in the face of such violence. This Web page, sponsored by the BBC, provides a detailed overview of the conflict.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism
Sontag discusses how pacifism has changed since Virginia Woolf's time, when people believed that war could be abolished. No one, Sontag claims, is that naive today. Still, pacifists continue to oppose war, with varying degrees of success. As you can see from this site, pacifism isn't always a cut-and-dried refusal to engage in violence. There are different kinds of pacifists, and they don't always agree with one another. Learn more about it here.
http://www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/features/war_essay1.html
As Sontag notes, war photography raises serious constitutional and ethical issues. This series by PBS explores the history of war photography in the U.S. and discusses its effects on the Americans' attitudes toward war. You can also see some famous war photographs.
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