Novelty of/as metaphor: Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, and Yvonne Rainer

In Chapter one, "Susan Sontag and the novelty of the failure of novelty," we outline the realization by Susan Sontag in her prose work that novelty seems inaccessible in the current "American situation" for reasons that are unique to our time and place. Photography and film with their mass-produced images, consumer culture with its repetitions in the guise of novelties, and the institutionalization of Surrealism have overtaken artistic expression and experience. The horrors of fascism and world war, and the suffering of the incurably ill in this century have all suggested that the pursuit of ethical metaphors may be more valuable than the pursuit of ones that are new for the sake of novelty.; "Adrienne Rich and the will to novelty," Chapter two, takes up the question of novelty from the feminist point of view. Women have much to gain, potentially, from novel forms of expression and novel understandings of gender difference. In her poetry, Rich stresses that the creation of such novelty of expression requires a prior novelty of vision and an almost bodily "will to change" an existing order. Novelty of metaphor requires novel ideas of literality: "the truth of the new is never on the news," she writes. Rich's poetry, accordingly, is intent upon grounding metaphorical expression in women's literal realities.; And in Chapter three, "Yvonne Rainer and the false comforts of dead metaphor," we add a new variable to the novelty equation: the medium of film. Film is particularly susceptible to repeated images and dead metaphors, according to Rainer, partially because of the power of the Hollywood film industry, partially because of how the film image is always an imperfect repetition of something else, such as the negative upon which it is based or the lost original moment of filming. Rainer paradoxically makes the problem of novelty into a novel cinematic technique.; All three figures are, in a sense, carrying out the traditional Christian project of uniting Word with Flesh, language with good human actions, as a source of redemption. And yet all three figures, noticing the current failure of such unions, and their corresponding liberal humanist utopias, also turn to the ongoing difficulties of distinguishing between the literal and the metaphorical. God is traditionally that which encompasses and unites such opposites. But what place does God now have in a world in which such dichotomies don't seem to resolve or connect, in a world in which such dichotomies seem merely to exist, without any larger redemptive framework for synthesis? (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...