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Against Interpretation and Other Essays is a collection of essay
Essay

An essay is usually a short piece of writing. It is often written from an author's personal Perspective . Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author....
s by Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an United States author, filmmaker, philosopher, literary theorist, and activism....
 which was published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style", "Notes on 'Camp'", and the titular essay "Against Interpretation". In the last, Sontag argued that the emphasis which had come to be placed on the intellect under modern social and cultural conditions had given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics
Aesthetics

Aesthetics or esthetics is commonly known as the study of senses or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste ....
 that was increasingly usurping the spiritual importance of art.






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Against Interpretation and Other Essays is a collection of essay
Essay

An essay is usually a short piece of writing. It is often written from an author's personal Perspective . Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author....
s by Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an United States author, filmmaker, philosopher, literary theorist, and activism....
 which was published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style", "Notes on 'Camp'", and the titular essay "Against Interpretation". In the last, Sontag argued that the emphasis which had come to be placed on the intellect under modern social and cultural conditions had given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics
Aesthetics

Aesthetics or esthetics is commonly known as the study of senses or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste ....
 that was increasingly usurping the spiritual importance of art. Rather than recognizing great creative works as possible sources of energy and defense against the brute rationality and empiricism that seemed to be seeping into every aspect of western life at the middle of the twentieth century, she argued, contemporary critics were all too often taking art's transcendental power for granted, and focusing instead on their own intellectually constructed abstractions like "form" and "content." In effect, she wrote, interpretation had become "the intellect's revenge upon art." The essay famously finished with the words, "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art".

Contents

  • Against interpretation
  • On style
  • The artist as exemplary sufferer
  • Simone Weil
    Simone Weil

    Simone Weil , who occasionally used the anagrammatic pen name Emile Novis, was a French philosopher, Christian mysticism, and social activist....
  • Camus
    Albert Camus

    Albert Camus was an Algerian-born France author, Philosophy, and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label....
    ' Notebooks
  • Michel Leiris
    Michel Leiris

    Julien Michel Leiris was a France surrealist writer and ethnographer....
    ' Manhood
  • The anthropologist
    Anthropology

    Anthropology is the study of humans and humanity in its totality. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, and the humanities. In Great Britain it was originally divided into physical anthropology and cultural anthropology, which itself was divided into archaeology, technology, ethnology and sociology ....
     as hero
  • The literary criticism of Georg Lukacs
    Georg Lukács

    Gy?rgy Luk?cs was a Hungary Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism....
  • Sartre
    Jean-Paul Sartre

    Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialism philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism....
    's Saint Genet
    Jean Genet

    Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial France novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activism. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing....
  • Nathalie Sarraute
    Nathalie Sarraute

    Nathalie Sarraute was a lawyer and a Francophone writer of Russian Jewish origin....
     and the novel
  • Ionesco
    Eugčne Ionesco

    Eug?ne Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu , was a Romanian and France playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
  • Reflections on The Deputy
    The Deputy

    File:KGerstein.jpgThe Deputy, a Christian tragedy , also known as The Representative, is a controversial 1963 drama by Rolf Hochhuth which indicts Pope Pius XII for his failure to take action or speak out against The Holocaust....
  • The death of tragedy,
  • Going to theater, etc.
  • Marat
    Jean-Paul Marat

    Jean-Paul Marat , was a Switzerland-born physician, political theorist and scientist better known as a radical journalist and politician from the French Revolution....
     / Sade
    Marquis de Sade

    Donatien Alphonse Fran?ois de Sade, Marquis de Sade was a France aristocrat, revolutionary and novelist. His novels were philosophical novel and sadomasochistic, exploring such controversial subjects as rape, bestiality and necrophilia....
     / Artaud
    Antonin Artaud

    Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud was a France playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. Antonin is a diminutive form of Antoine , and was among a long list of names which Artaud used throughout his life....
  • Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson
    Robert Bresson

    Robert Bresson was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic style....
  • Godard
    Jean-Luc Godard

    Jean-Luc Godard is a French and Swiss filmmaker and one of the founding members of the Nouvelle Vague, or "French New Wave".Godard was born to French people-Swiss parents in Paris....
    's Vivre Sa Vie
  • The imagination of disaster
  • Jack Smith
    Jack Smith (film director)

    Jack Smith was an United States filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground film. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art, and has been critically recognized as a master photographer, though his photographic works are rare and remain largely unknown....
    's Flaming Creatures
  • Resnais
    Alain Resnais

    'Alain Resnais' is a French film director whose early works are often grouped within the French New Wave or nouvelle vague film movement. Although he has had a long and fruitful career, Resnais is best known for three early works that deal with themes of memory and trauma: Night and Fog , Hiroshima Mon Amour , and Last Year at M...
    ' Muriel
  • A note on novels and films
  • Piety without content
  • Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown
    Norman O. Brown

    Norman Oliver Brown was an United States classicist. Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsace and Cubans origin....
    's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
    Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History

    Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History is a work of literary theory published in 1959 by Norman O. Brown. Its theoretical basis is a synthesis of Freudian, Friedrich Nietzsche and Marxist thinking....
  • Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition
  • Notes on "Camp"
  • One culture and the new sensibility
  • Afterword: Thirty Years Later


External links

  • essay in response to Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation