Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Leland Poague (Iowa State University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1966

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)
- Essay Collection

Resources

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (14). Thus famously concludes “Against Interpretation”, the title essay of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), a book whose oracular pronouncements are eminently quotable and easily mocked, if also endlessly compelling and productive to judge by the extended tradition of commentary Sontag’s never-out-of-print first essay collection has generated (see Shusterman and Rush). It is also, in my experience, a difficult book to draw conclusions from, or be conclusive about, especially given Sontag’s combination of “anthropological” and “occasional” procedures.

Most of the volume derives from reviews or review essays occasioned …

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5527 words

Citation: Poague, Leland. "Against Interpretation". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 September 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6811, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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