Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312280864
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/25/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	91,648
Product dimensions:	5.35(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.85(d)

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.

Table of 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
Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition
Notes on "Camp"
One culture and the new sensibility
Afterword: Thirty Years Later

Editorial Reviews

Susan Sontag's essays are great interpretations, and even fulfillments, of what is really going on.” —Carlos Fuentes

“A dazzling intellectual performance.” —Vogue

“Susan Sontag is a writer of rare energy and provocative newness.” —The Nation

“The theoretical portions of her book are delightful to read because she can argue so well. . . . Her ideas are consistently stimulating.” —Commentary

“She has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience.” —Time

From the Publisher