Against Interpretation and Other Essays
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First published in 1966, Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays established her as one of the most incisive and influential cultural critics of the twentieth century. Across essays on literature, film, theatre and the visual arts, she challenges the habit of reducing works of art to hidden meanings, political messages or psychological explanations, arguing instead for a more immediate and attentive engagement with form, sensation and style. From the fiction of Samuel Beckett and the films of Alain Resnais to the theatre of Antonin Artaud, Sontag moves with remarkable assurance between artistic traditions, questioning the boundaries that separate high culture from popular expression. Her famous opening essay gives the collection its intellectual centre: a call to experience art more fully, rather than treating it as a puzzle to be solved.
Combining philosophical precision with an unusually vivid appreciation of artistic experience, these essays range across modernism, cinema, literature and the avant-garde, revealing Sontag’s restless curiosity and resistance to intellectual convention. Her writing helped reshape post-war criticism, bringing European thought into conversation with American cultural life while insisting that art’s power lies in more than what it can be made to signify. Against Interpretation and Other Essays remains a defining work of modern criticism, illuminating not only the works it discusses but also the ways we look, read and think.
From the book
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
— Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays
On Against Interpretation and Other Essays
“Brilliant, punchy, brisk, and, in a characteristically contemporary way, a little perverse.”
— Robert Mazzocco, The New York Review of Books