Against Interpretation
"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Sontag's first essay collection announced a new kind of American intellectual: polymathic, European-inflected, sensuously serious. The title essay is one of the most quoted in all of cultural criticism.
The price of admission is Sontag's frame of reference: mid-sixties French cinema, happenings, theater you have not seen, names dropped without a footnote. Readers without that furniture call whole stretches impenetrable, and even a sympathetic pass can feel “taxing and dense.” The collection is uneven besides; Kirkus thought the theater pieces usually fall apart, and its praise came wrapped in a shrug, “Now and then, she succeeds.” There is also the contradiction readers keep tripping on: a book against interpretation that interprets everything it touches, delivered in a tone some find closer to arrogance than confidence. Even the famous centerpiece wobbles under attention. The camp essay circles its subject for 58 numbered notes, and one reader closes it admitting “I still have very little grasp on what Camp is.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
