This is a long essay written in the mid to late 1970s as Susan Sontag has just learned she has cancer. The essay is not narrative or personal really at all, but explores the ways in which illness is defined through metaphors in literature and culture. Because of her own cancer, cancer becomes one of the two main subjects, with tuberculosis being the other. The primary focus of the two subjects in the essay is to explore the ways in which meaning has been inscribed […]