SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) was a North-American writer, theoretician and political activist. She was born in New York, of Jewish origin, although she did not have a religious education or claimed that cultural matrix.

She was firstly considered as an avant-garde intellectual in the 1960 decade, was categorized as a neo-conservative in the 1990 decade, but she was, above all, a constantly innovative and controversial voice, refusing labels and essentialisms and disturbing status quo. She wrote about diverse issues, such as literature, philosophy, rhetoric, visual arts, photography, pornography, theatre, cinema, disease and war. Among her widely known works are Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989). More recently, she caused a lot of controversy when, on The New Yorker, stating that the 9/11 attack was a consequence of the US foreign policy and refuted the manipulative rhetoric that infantilizes the North-American people; avid critic of the Bush Administration and the Iraq War, she published, in 2004, Regarding the Torture of Others.

 

 

 

 

TONI MORRISON is a Afro-American writer and intellectual. She was born in 191, in Lorain, Ohio, in a poor family from the South that migrated to the North in the beginning of 20th Century.

Only in 1970 she debuted as novelist with The Bluest Eye. This was followed by many other novels, such as Sula, (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003) and A Mercy (2008). Her work focus on the Afro-American community, showing her attention to racism and discrimination of black people in USA.

Besides her novels, which also includes children books, Toni Morrison has published essays, like Playing in the Dark: Essays on Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and two intervention books about two controversial issues, which emphasizes her role as public intellectual: the accusation of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas and the O. J. Simpson case.

She has received several awards and honours, including the international acknowledgement with the Nobel Prize in 1993.

 

 

 

Biographic Notes

 

Maria Irene Ramalho is Professor at the Anglo-American Studies Unit of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, where she is the scientific coordinator of the Doctoral Programmes in American Studies and Feminist Studies. Since 1999, she is International Affiliate at the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as guest lecturer. As a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, since 1987, she integrates the Research Group on Comparative Cultural Studies, participating in several research projects and coordinating some of them. She has several publications, both in Portuguese and English, about English-speaking literature and culture (with special attention to US poetry), American studies, comparative literature, poetic theory, cultural studies and feminist studies. Her current areas of major interest include the studies on Modernism and Modernity, comparative studies on poetry, poetics and philosophy, theories of American studies and feminist theories.

 

 

 

Isabel Caldeira is a researcher at the Centre for Social Sciences since 1987, as member of Research Group on Comparative Cultural Studies and, from 1994 to 1996, was member of the Executive Board. She is Associate Professor in the Anglo-American Studies Unit of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. She holds a Doctoral Degree in American Literature (1993) by the University of Coimbra, with the dissertation "A Cicatriz da Palavra: História, Mito e Literatura na Ficção de Toni Morrison". She lectures at FLUC, in the Graduate Degree in Modern Languages, as well as at the 2nd and 3rd cycles' programme of American Studies. She participates in several research teams for NECC projects, such as "Memory, Violence and Identity: New Comparative Perspectives on Modernism" and "Intellectuals, Culture and Society". Her current research interests include the following fields and themes: American and Afro-American studies; comparative literary and cultural studies (African Diaspora).