Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag published Against Interpretation in 1966, and the book is often given as Against Interpretation and Other Essays. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in the arts and letters category.

The collection brings together essays and reviews she had written over the previous years, and three of the pieces have lasted better than the rest: Notes on Camp, with its account of the sensibility that turns seriousness on its head; On Style; and the title essay.

The argument of that title essay is that the criticism of her day had grown too fond of interpretation. By looking for hidden content and fitting each work into a scheme of meanings, she says, critics were neglecting the sensuous impact of art and the novelty of what an artist had actually made, and she calls instead for a criticism that describes how a work is put together and what it does, rather than what it is supposed to mean. The essay has been read ever since as the moment that argument entered the mainstream of American criticism.