Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Front Cover
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.

 

Selected pages

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
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

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
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
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne's College, Oxford University. She was the author of 17 books including four novels, a collection of short stories, several plays, and eight works of nonfiction. Her novels are The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction. On Photography received the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Art in America. She also wrote and directed four feature films and stage plays in the United States and Europe. She died from leukemia on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71.

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