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 Sontag.
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
“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
Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; I, etcetera, a collection of stories; several plays; and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for criticism, and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. She lives in New York City. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.
Picador
336 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
$14.00
Trade Paperback Pub Year : 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28086-6
$ 17.00
