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Percy and Sontag


Compare and contrast the ideas utilized by Sontag and Percy to demonstrate the ways in which we are suffering a loss of the real.

Both Percy and Sontag discuss the reasons we choose to photograph an event or experience. What are these reasons and how do they cause us to loose our sovereignty?


Percy

Percy asks, “How does one see the thing better when others don’t?” Describe Percy’s view of social desensitization and explain his ideas of using the beaten path to experience things as if no one was there.

Percy paraphrases Kierkegaard: “once a person is seen as a specimen of race or a species, at that very moment he ceases to be an individual. Then there are no more individuals but only specimens.” Explain this concept using evidence from the text.

Sontag
Evaluate Sontag’s claim that photography is a predatory weapon. Include and discuss the evidence she uses to make this claim and any evidence in her text that may contradict.


Explain Sontag’s quote, “a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. What evidence does Sontag use to support the quote.