Against Interpretation and Other Essays

In 1966, Susan Sontag was thirty-three years old, recently divorced, raising a child alone in New York, and in the process of becoming the most important cultural critic in America. This debut collection announced her arrival with the force of a manifesto. Its opening essay — ‘Against Interpretation’ — remains one of the most quoted and most argued-about pieces of criticism in the English language.

Sontag’s target was the tradition of literary interpretation that treats a work of art as a puzzle to be solved — a surface to be penetrated in search of hidden meanings — and thereby tames the disruptive, sensory, immediate power that art at its best possesses. Her counter-proposal — ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’ — is not a retreat from seriousness but a demand for a different kind of seriousness, one that begins with the actual experience of the work rather than its translation into something else.

The collection also contains ‘Notes on Camp’ — the essay that introduced the concept of camp to serious critical discourse — alongside pieces on Camus, Sartre, Godard, Bresson, and science fiction. Essential twentieth-century criticism. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.