Against Interpretation

First published in 1966, this celebrated book—Sontag's first collection of essays—quickly became a modern classic, and has had an enormous influence in America and abroad on thinking about the arts and contemporary culture. As well as the title essay and the famous "Notes on 'Camp,'" Against Interpretation includes original and provocative discussions of Sartre, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thinking. This edition features a new afterword by the author.

Praise

"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

About the Author(s)

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was the author of numerous works of non-fiction, including the groundbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation, and of four novels, including In America, which won the National Book Award.   

photo: Mikhail Lemkhin

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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