Revisiting Sontag: evaluating the responses to “camp”

Susan Sontag’s piece “Notes on Camp” attempts to define the term “camp” for an audience who presumably has little experience with the topic. Responses to this piece were varied, and the emotions and thought invoked were interesting.

In her piece “‘Seeing everything in quotation marks:’ the paradox of Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp,’” Raven Yamamoto presents a thoughtful analysis of the paradox in Sontag’s structuring of her essay. Yamamoto points to the campiness of Sontag’s piece, revealing how it delights in the convolution of what should be an easy-to-understand writing structure.

Furthermore, Yamamoto’s self-awareness is quite impressive, as she uses her frustration with the lack of a true definition of camp to further an argument she makes within her piece. She acknowledges the challenges she has in reading and comprehending the concept of camp, aligning her with the common reader who is not versed in the discourse community of which Sontag is a part. In this way, Yamamoto inserts herself as a character, adding a literary element to her piece of journalism.

Another interesting response to Sontag’s piece comes from Hannah Wohlenberg’s piece “Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on ‘Camp’’: The Illiteracy of the Met Gala.” Referring to the recent camp-themed Met Gala, she points to how Sontag’s article demonstrates the failure of the event to capture the spirit of camp.

Like Yamamoto, Wohlenberg examined the enumerative format of the piece; however, her focus was on how such a style allowed for a clarity in understanding. Instead of presenting camp in a complex way, Sontag examines the subject in a sequential format which Wohlenberg found useful in developing her own understanding of camp. Wohlenberg also uses comedy in her piece to connect with the reader, giving them a shared third party at which to laugh for their inability to perform properly the idea of camp.