Against Interpretation: And Other Essays - Softcover

Sontag, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312280866 ISBN 13: 9780312280864

Publisher: Picador USA, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"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

From the Back Cover:

'A dazzling intellectual performance' Vogue

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since.

'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312280866
• ISBN 13: 9780312280864
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336