Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation

Author	Susan Sontag
Language	English
Genre	Literary criticism
Publisher	Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Publication date	1966
Publication place	United States
OCLC	171772

Against Interpretation and Other Essays is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag which was published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style", "Notes on 'Camp'", and the titular essay "Against Interpretation". In the last, Sontag argued that the emphasis which had come to be placed on the intellect under modern social and cultural conditions had given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics that was increasingly usurping the spiritual importance of art. Rather than recognizing great creative works as possible sources of energy and defense against the brute rationality and empiricism that seemed to be seeping into every aspect of western life at the middle of the twentieth century, she argued, contemporary critics were all too often taking art's transcendental power for granted, and focusing instead on their own intellectually constructed abstractions like "form" and "content." In effect, she wrote, interpretation had become "the intellect's revenge upon art." The essay famously finished with the words, "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art".

The 1990 edition of the collection is available from Anchor Books (ISBN 0-312-28086-6).

Contents

• Against interpretation
• On style
• The artist as exemplary sufferer
• Simone Weil
• Camus' Notebooks
• Michel Leiris' Manhood
• The anthropologist as hero
• The literary criticism of Georg Lukacs
• Sartre's Saint Genet
• Nathalie Sarraute and the novel
• Ionesco
• Reflections on The Deputy
• The death of tragedy,
• Going to theater, etc.
• Marat / Sade / Artaud
• Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson
• Godard's Vivre Sa Vie
• The imagination of disaster
• Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures
• Resnais' Muriel
• A note on novels and films
• Piety without content
• Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
• Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition
• Notes on "Camp"
• One culture and the new sensibility
• Afterword: Thirty Years Later

External links

• Page for Against Interpretation on official Sontag site
• Louise Norlie, For and Against Interpretation essay in response to Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation