Overview
Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the first collection of essays by the American writer and critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004), published in 1966 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It gathers pieces written in the first half of the 1960s, most of which had appeared in periodicals associated with the New York and transatlantic literary-intellectual world of the period, among them Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and Evergreen Review. Coming shortly after her debut novel, The Benefactor (1963), the book established Sontag’s reputation as a formidable critic and quickly made her one of the most visible cultural commentators in the United States.
The volume brings together short critical essays and reviews on literature, film, theater, and ideas, ranging across the European avant-garde and modernist tradition as well as contemporary American culture. Its unifying concern is less any single subject than a distinctive critical attitude—a commitment to the sensory, formal, and experiential dimensions of art, and a suspicion of criticism that reduces works to their supposed hidden meanings.
The title essay and its argument
The book takes its title from the essay “Against Interpretation,” a polemic against the dominance of interpretation in the reception of art. Sontag argues that the habit of treating a work of art primarily as a set of contents to be decoded—of asking what a work “really means”—impoverishes and tames it. Interpretation, in her account, is a way of digging behind or beneath the work to extract a latent meaning, and in doing so it slights the immediate, sensory presence of the art itself. She traces the interpretive impulse partly to the influence of overarching systems of meaning such as those associated with Marx and Freud, which encourage the reader to see art as a symptom or coded message rather than as a thing to be experienced directly. Against this, she calls for a criticism attentive to form, surface, and the sensuous immediacy of art. The essay closes with one of Sontag’s most frequently quoted formulations, that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
The companion essay “On Style” extends this line of thought by challenging the conventional opposition between style and content, or form and substance. Sontag rejects the notion that style is a decorative surface added to a pre-existing meaning, arguing instead that style is inseparable from what a work is and does. Together these two essays articulate the aesthetic program that gives the collection its coherence and its polemical energy.
Range of the essays
Beyond the programmatic opening pieces, the collection is notable for the breadth of its subjects and for treating high modernist literature and philosophy alongside film and popular forms.
Several essays engage European writers and thinkers, including Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Cesare Pavese, Michel Leiris, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the critic and theorist Georg Lukács. Sontag also wrote on Jean-Paul Sartre’s study of Jean Genet, and on the fiction and theory of the French nouveau roman, including the work of Nathalie Sarraute. These essays reflect her deep engagement with European—especially French—intellectual and literary culture, which she helped introduce to and interpret for an American audience.
The collection gives substantial attention to film, then still fighting for recognition as a serious art form. It includes writing on the austere, spiritual cinema of Robert Bresson and on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, and an essay on science-fiction and disaster films, “The Imagination of Disaster,” which reads such films as expressions of collective anxiety in the nuclear age. Sontag also wrote on avant-garde theater and performance, including the phenomenon of “Happenings,” which she analyzed as an art of radical juxtaposition, and on Eugène Ionesco and other contemporary theatrical developments. Additional essays take up psychoanalytic and religious themes, among them a discussion of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.
“Notes on ‘Camp'” and “One Culture and the New Sensibility”
Two essays in the collection became especially influential. “Notes on ‘Camp,'” written in a distinctive form as a series of numbered aphoristic observations and dedicated to Oscar Wilde, offered one of the first serious attempts to describe and analyze the “camp” sensibility—a taste for artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and stylization, and a mode of appreciation that finds a peculiar seriousness in extravagance and a delight in the failed or the excessive. The essay was widely read and discussed and did much to bring the word and concept into general cultural currency; it remains a touchstone in the study of aesthetics, sexuality, and popular taste.
The concluding essay, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” articulates a broader cultural argument that runs beneath much of the book. Sontag describes and champions an emerging sensibility that erodes the traditional boundary between “high” and “low” culture, and that is prepared to take pleasure in a wide array of forms—including popular music, film, and design—alongside the traditional fine arts. She resists the idea that seriousness must be solemn or confined to a narrow canon, and connects the new sensibility to changes in the relation between art, science, and technology.
Context and significance
Against Interpretation appeared at a moment of intense ferment in American cultural life, and it captured and helped shape the intellectual temper of the 1960s. Sontag emerged from and engaged with the milieu of the New York intellectuals, but she was younger than the central figures of that group and more attuned to European modernism, to the postwar avant-garde, and to popular and emerging art forms. The book’s cosmopolitan range, its confident advocacy of difficult and experimental work, and its willingness to treat film and popular culture with critical seriousness marked a distinctive voice.
The collection situates Sontag’s aesthetic commitments—her privileging of form, surface, and sensuous experience over the search for hidden content—at the center of her early critical identity. These preoccupations continued to inform her later work, though she went on to write in different modes and on different subjects, including her celebrated books On Photography and Illness as Metaphor, and she at times reflected with some distance on the exuberance and polemical spirit of these early essays.
Widely reviewed and much debated on its appearance, Against Interpretation became a landmark of twentieth-century cultural criticism. Its title essay and “Notes on ‘Camp'” in particular are frequently anthologized and cited, and the book as a whole is regarded as one of the key documents of 1960s critical thought, both for its arguments about how art should be received and for its role in establishing Sontag as a leading American essayist and public intellectual.
