Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

Overview

A reissue of Susan Sontag’s classic first collection, featuring some of her most beloved writing—on art, life, camp, and criticism—that cemented her legacy as one of the brightest thinkers of, and beyond, her generation.

Susan Sontag is widely regarded as one of the most formidable, original, and influential writers of the last century. Against Interpretation is a modern classic, her first-ever collection and the work that launched her storied career when it was published in 1966. It has influenced generations of readers, and still contains some of her best-known essays, including “Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation,” and a dazzling range of, well, interpretations. Grand in scope—ranging from philosophy to film to religion to psychoanalysis—and short in length, this pocket-sized, pithy, and profound book introduces “a larger-than-life intellectual powerhouse” (Leslie Jamison).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250374752
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including 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 nine works of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded 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