There was a time, long ago and in another age, when anyone at university who wanted to be well-read or conversant with things intellectual read this book. I'm one of them. I sat in Cross Campus at New Haven and devoured "Against Interpretation" one autumn afternoon. Needless to say, I had a deep intellectual crush on Susan Sontag--- ah, I thought, if only I'd been able to court her in some alternate New York where we were both eighteen or nineteen! I still love this book, all these years later.

What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize. To bask in intelligent discourse of literature, fine arts, and theatre, is to turn to Susan Sontag's Against Interpretations, where the cultured world is viewed aesthetically. Serious conversations elude the personal, criticism becomes communion with art, wherein the reader is almost an after-thought because the dialogue is the writer, the intellectual musing, and the subject. The prose pulsat

Here is where I discovered my model, my ideal: I too aspire to be able to discuss and analyze so deftly literature, cinema, music, theater, philosophy, theory and society, and their countless and inevitable intersections. The celebrated "Notes on Camp" and the title essay are the standouts, but everything--even the comparatively weak theater reviews--are worth reading. "My idea of a writer: someone who is interested in 'everything.'"-from "Afterward: 30 Years Later"

I’ve some difficulty processing Ms. Sontag’s thoughts. If there were une Académie Américaine, she would have been a leading member, maybe the only member.  Was she America's Simone de Beauvoir?  She was indeed a prodigy, one who certainly would have had no truck with this corn country son of an accountant.  How do I square the accolades bestowed from academics and publishers with a voice directed at such a narrow, elite audience, an audience that would shun me as a member?A few thoughts come to

A wide-ranging debut collection of essays on art, film, and literature that’s as stimulating today as it was when it was first released in the ‘60s. Sontag’s caustic wit, sharp prose, and succinct observations about aesthetics make all the essays worth reading, even though many of her ideas have long since been absorbed into the mainstream. Here, she examines everything from existentialist thought to the tropes of science fiction, and her mind’s always interesting to follow.

A note and some acknowledgmentsI--Against interpretation--On styleII--The artist as exemplary sufferer--Simone Weil--Camus' Notebooks--Michel Leiris' Manhood--The anthropologist as hero--The literary criticism of Georg Lukács--Sartre's Saint Genet--Nathalie Sarraute and the novelIII--Ionesco--Reflections on The Deputy--The death of tragedy--Going to theater, etc.--Marat / Sade / ArtaudIV--Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson--Godard's Vivre Sa Vie--The imagination of disaster--Jack Smi...

Like most collections (of essays or stories), this book – Susan Sontag’s first – is uneven. Some pieces are absolutely brilliant, making me see art and culture in a whole new way, while a few are so esoteric and dull I couldn’t wait to be done with them.What ties them together is Sontag’s erudition, passion and enthusiasm for what she’s writing about – what she’s thinking. To borrow a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Sontag’s writing shows you a mind at work.“Before I wrote the essays I

The most famous essays contained in this volume are probably "Against Interpretation", "On Style" and "Notes on Camp", but there are other gems in here: Texts on Sartre's Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr and on William S. Burroughs, "The Pornographic Imagination" (which tackles works like Story of the Eye, The 120 Days of Sodom, and Story of O), plus, eternally relevant, "The Imagination of Disaster". The essays make you stop and ponder again and again, while your TBR pile keeps on growing. Thinkin...

The famous essay on camp is in this edition as well as wonderful essays on Godard and Beckett. Sontag was an amazing essayist, a really great cultural critic. A walking and breathing treasure of knowledge and clear thinking. One would think she would have loved Goodreads -- but then maybe not. For sure she would be arguing with everyone on this site. What fun!But seriously even if one disagrees with her work, she is important just for her taste in literature among other things.

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Other Essays offers an intellectual back and forth on how to approach art and ends up showing us, above all else, a mind at work. That was really the most fun part of this. In the opening essay, Sontag argues that interpretation is an act that replaces the meaning of art, be it writing, theater, film or painting. I like the point Sontag makes, and underst...

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.I ended up finding 'Against Interpretation' useful. Its central claim is that there is a kind of interpretation that is anti-art in that it diminishes the possibilities for appreciating/enjoying/experiencing the art rather than increa...

Susan Sontag, 1933-2004 - American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, political activistOne of the leading critics of her generation, Susan Sontag's powerful voice is much in evidence in this outstanding collection. For the purposes of my review, I will focus on the lead essay, Against Interpretation, an essay that continues to speak profoundly to us today. Here are a batch of direct quotes coupled with my comments: "None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art kn...

Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan SontagAgainst Interpretation is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style," and the eponymous essay "Against Interpretation." In the last, Sontag argues that in the new approach to aesthetics the spiritual importance of art is being replaced by the emphasis on the intellect. Rather than recognizing great creative works as possible sources of energy, she argues, contem...

In the first volume of her journal Reborn, Susan Sontag wrote that to interpret is to determine, to restrict; or to exfoliate, read meaning into. Perhaps she was deliberate in her focus on form, in her evasions of definitions within this collection of disparate essays that range from critiques of philosophy, art, movies to blatant sixties style fangirling. Perhaps it was her own refusal to be restricted, to be read into, that she transmuted into a writing that has a clear, traceable form and yet...

Sontag had such a brilliant mind.

There don't seem to be as many public intellectuals around as there used to be. Sure, there are more commentators than ever—look at the many, many bloggers out there, as well as other individuated voices carving out their own identity, even within larger publications. But the public intellectual in the middle of the 20th century seemed to comprise something different, something a bit larger in scope. These days, criticism tends to be done piecewise, either commenting or reacting incrementally on...

Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: am intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. That's Ms. Sontag on Genet, in lieu of discussing Sartre's Saint Genet. I find it an amazing analogy for thinking and I'm curious what Heidegger would have thought of the affront? There are attendant opportunities which have to be ignored. Yet it lingers and I contemplate.Against Interpretation was Sontag's first collection

I loved 'On Photography', it's one of the best essays I've read. Some of her others however, I haven't thought much of. This collection of essays and criticism from the 1960s is certainly one of the better Sontag books I've read. It flatters the reader's intelligence without being intimidating. From Sophocles to Sartre, it seems that Sontag has read everything, and has the gift of getting her ideas across in reader-friendly prose, something that isn't shared by all those in the same boat as her....

"Instead of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Yes... But what the hell does that mean?

My idea of a writer: someone who is interested in "everything."Ma'am I have a crush on your brain.