Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Susan Sontag

Macmillan, Aug 25, 2001 - Literary Collections - 312 pages

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - lethalmauve - LibraryThing

The endurance and magnificence of this essay collection lie not with their ability to persuade but their stimulating arguments and ideas. However—this is a reductive take on an otherwise complex ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - gregorybrown - LibraryThing

There don't seem to be as many public intellectuals around as there used to be. Sure, there are more commentators than ever—look at the many, many bloggers out there, as well as other individuated ...

Contents

• Against interpretation: 3
• On style: 15
• II: 37
• The artist as exemplary sufferer: 39
• Simone Weil: 49
• Camus Notebooks: 52
• Michel Leiris Manhood: 61
• The anthropologist as hero: 69
• The literary criticism of Georg Lukács: 82
• Sartres Saint Genet: 93
• Nathalie Sarraute and the novel: 100
• III: 113
• Ionesco: 115
• Reflections on The Deputy: 124
• The death of tragedy: 132
• Going to theater etc: 140
• MaratSadeArtaud: 163
• IV: 175
• Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson: 177
• Godards Vivre Sa Vie: 196
• The imagination of disaster: 209
• Jack Smiths Flaming Creatures: 226
• Resnais Muriel: 232
• A note on novels and films: 242
• V: 247
• Piety without content: 249
• Psychoanalysis and Norman O Browns Life Against Death: 256
• an art of radical juxtaposition: 263
• Notes on Camp: 275
• One culture and the new sensibility: 293
• Afterword: 305

About the author

Susan Sontag wrote four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and eight books of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she won the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Against Interpretation: And Other Essays; Volume 52 of Kushiel's Legacy; Picador (Series)
• Author: Susan Sontag
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2001
• ISBN: 0312280866, 9780312280864
• Length: 312 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Philosophy / History & Surveys / General; Social Science / Popular Culture