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