Arts: Postcards From Camp

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Culturebox Postcards From Camp The delight is in the details. By J. Bryan Lowder Posted Tuesday, Apr 02, 2013, at 02:13 PM ET It's one of the great accidents of intellectual history that Susan Sontag became known as the "philosopher" of camp. While she was responsible, of course, for elevating the concept to eye-level for the (straight) chattering class of the United States, her famous essay only provides a handful of useful insights about it. As I argued in the previous post, "Notes on Camp" is far more successful at describing a certain aesthetic constellation we'll call "the campy" than it is in expounding true camp. For that kind of analysis, we should look to another critical luminary, a person whom Sontag admired so much that she assembled both the go-to "reader" of his major works and his most moving obit while, ironically, never making the camp connection. To be fair, Roland Barthes appears to have only once mentioned the word camp in his published writing (as an aside in a lecture at that), just months before his untimely death at the grill of a Parisian laundry van in the spring of 1980. But the paucity of reference doesn't matter—perhaps, as Sontag says of the campy object, the best scholars of camp are "naïve" as to the nature of their own project.  Barthes, the French writer, philosopher, and academic best known for his work in semiotics, turns out to be the most advanced—or, more appropriately, nuanced—analyst of camp who has ever lived, at least if you read him my way. And indeed, an appreciation of "the ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Print Money. Mail Everybody a Check. Spark of Genius Marry Young	Advertisement
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