Also, I was certain, and I remain certain, that while I regard Oscar Wilde as a genius, Sontag made the error of taking Wilde too frequently—and in fatal moments—at his word. It was her first collection of essays on the arts and contemporary culture. Essays of the 1960s & 70s: Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays by. Complete summary of Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. You will also find yourself seeking out the works of the writers and filmmakers discussed in this book. Becoming Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation shrugs off Freudian criticism at the moment when the techniques of Freud, and Freudian theories were most potent in their effect upon the United States. It is by deliberate rejection of context that she strips the creative act of ritual, renders artists mute, depoliticizes, neuters, and demeans notions of depth and deception, implication and interrogation, makes the reader, the viewer, the listener a bland consumer, and susceptible to manipulations for which Sontag would deny them a reciprocal vocabulary. Please try again. (. Susan Sontag setzt sich in ihrer Argumentation von der Idee ab, Kunst sei Ausdruck oder Abbild von etwas, das im Vorgang der Interpretation “entdeckt” werden müsse. Against Interpretation Susan Sontag The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. In order to navigate out of this carousel, please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. In the film Regarding Susan Sontag, director Nancy Kates attempted to create, in her words, “the best possible entry point” to understanding the life and work of the famous writer, filmmaker and political activist.. devoid of intelligible latent content? Where she is correct is that some interpretations—she cites Rabbinical and Christian revisionism that seeks to obfuscate the expository ugliness, horror, and primitive tribalism of the Bible—are disingenuous, cynical, and yes, self-serving. Sontag Susan Rosenblatt néven született New Yorkban, 1933. január 16-án, zsidó családban. Against Interpretation disavows Marxist criticism at the moment when ‘the artist’ was most alienated from his product, when proletarian content and bourgeois presentation and consumption collided, and sometimes deliberately/ironically so by use of mechanization, mass production, and the silk-screen in painting. Still updated!! Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. One could even cite it as a riposte, and yet it felt juvenile, nonetheless. Judith Halberstam. Susan Sontag has 173 books on Goodreads with 362575 ratings. Because it sticks to a shortlist of canonical writers, the gay male archive binds itself to a narrow range of affective responses. Achetez neuf ou d'occasion The first archive is a camp archive, a repertoire of formalized and often formulaic responses to the banality of straight culture.” (Halberstam, p. 109-110). The essay, an enduring classic of art writing, considers the prevailing way that art critics made sense of the sensory objects of their attention. Looked at in retrospect, one of the surprising things about the late 1950s and early 1960s is just how superior we were given to believe French culture was. “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. in the context of not only feminism, but also civil rights, psychedelia, censorship, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Sixties as a decade of revolutionary interpretation and revision is intellectually derelict. # @ (& a $ bdc e * b fgh$ d* 8 8 ' ,18@!h In her own comparison, it makes some sense, but not enough. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. According to Warhol biographer Victor Bockris, “The campy put-on was a vital element since the support of the gay audience was a major factor in Andy’s success.” (Bockris, p.158). For a Freudian reading of the Doors or Dostoevsky to be insensitive, one has to assume there is no content, or that latent content is being fabricated retrospectively to fit the theory. Against Interpretation is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1966. Throughout Against Interpretation, Sontag insisted on the importance of historical specificity, which is not the same thing as relativism. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Susan Sontag's essay "On Style" (Against Interpretation) contains many passages to warm an aging aesthete's heart. --Carlos Fuentes "A dazzling intellectual performance." On Sontag’s terms, Against Interpretation should be overthrown, as a matter of duty. https://www.newyorker.com/.../susan-sontag-on-movies-for-interpretation Like “En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte.” ― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. This discussion will be chaired by F.… This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. It was a dangerously naïve essay then, and is more dangerous now. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. --The Nation "The theoretical portions of her book are delightful to read because she can argue so well. Share. We must always be suspicious of the text. I am old enough to remember the early 1960s. [Susan Sontag] Against interpretation and other es(BookZZ.org) Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. Each time I read these essays - perhaps because I feel such a connection with the ideas - I find myself underlining virtually half the articles. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. “Notes on Camp”, an essay was first published in 1964, and was republished in 1966 in her collection of essays, Against Interpretation. Okay, it might be “onerous” or “insensitive” to critique The Doors from the same position that one might critique Dostoevsky. Shut up and read this book. . The essay, an enduring classic of art writing, considers the prevailing way that art critics made sense of the sensory objects of their attention. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. On Sontag’s terms, Against Interpretation should be overthrown, as a matter of duty. It had the undeniable appeal of serving a ‘fuck you’ against the academy that sounded like more than a grunt. Brown. In a 1968 essay in Commentary, Irving Howe saw her as the “publicist” for a young generation of critics that was making its presence felt “like a spreading blot of anti-intellectualism.” Focusing on the woman rather than the work, other critics dubbed her “… Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere. Precisely when the ‘West’ was awakening awkwardly to the coercive facts of culture, and the politics it serves, Sontag suggested that we are best served by remaining asleep. But I can think of only two such persons whose absence would have left it duller: Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.Both were globe-trotting cosmopolites whom the camera loved and vice-versa, and who brought that rarest of qualities to the higher mental life: glamour. Victor Bockris. Steve Wasserman, editor at large, had kindly sent me Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stones Interview by Jonathan Cott. It's very difficult, however, to condense these essays down to a couple concepts, or draw a couple of quotes out of them. This is historically the first delivery of the now world-renowned essays by Susan Sontag. Neil McCarthy 8th June 2020. Did Warhol depict Alabama race riots in 1963-64 only for Sontag to suggest that we suppress the content, to resist meaning beyond the formal characteristics of the work, or to reduce content to its most minimal components? I will persevere but it is not a book for a good read. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. The greatest danger of Against Interpretation is that Sontag is willfully blind to the coercive facts of culture, to semiotics, propaganda, the insinuations of power in culture. Susan Sontag (/ ˈ s ɒ n t æ ɡ /; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. I was twenty-one, or twenty-two, and working through an obsession with Andy Warhol that had begun two years before. We must always be suspicious of the text. All culture is a displacement, however temporary, of violence. In a self-serving manner, I embraced Sontag’s essay; self-serving in the sense that I could use it against high culture, in defense of Warhol, and as an intellectual justification, a manifesto for a certain kind of banality—it agitated for pop, it was agit-pop—it was an academic argument for anti-intellectualism, sensuality, emotion and immediacy. .Her ideas are consistently stimulating." Mrs Sontag considers herself primarily a novelist: and,of course, she has every right to do so, but I have the feeling that her novels do not come near in any way to her essays' quality. The film explores the diverse intellectual contributions of the late Sontag, AB’51, who is among UChicago’s best known alumni. Previous page of related Sponsored Products. She claims that in bypassing the formal qualities of a work, we deny ourselves the sensational response that only comes from formal beauty. Then there was Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf. Was his “Death and Disaster” series of 1962-63, electric chairs, car crashes, toxic cans of tuna fish, etc. Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. I’ve been busy rereading it since Xmas, and want to take this chance to set down some thoughts regarding it. To begin with: It is time for people to stop ranting about Ms. Sontag's opinions about 9-11. When we dispense with the interpretation of culture, we become its victims. Susan Sontag is an avante-guarde writer (who discards conventions) who belongs to the American school of criticism. But this is false in that it ignores or is unaware of the intentionally latent content of The Doors: Blake, Huxley, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Dionysian, the criminal, etc. . The same intellectual moves will take on different values at different times; our very way of encountering art, politics and ethics shifts with time and place, and is inflected by that perspective. Hét évvel később anyja hozzáment Nathan Sontaghoz; Susan és húga Judith felvette mostohaapjuk nevét. tags: homer, nihilism, oedipus, tragedy, values. 0 likes. It includes, in no particular order, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland, and Kiki and Herb, but it rarely mentions all kinds of other anti-social writers, artists, and texts such as Valerie Solanas, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Highsmith, Wallace and Gromit, Johnny Rotten, Nicole Eiseman, Eileen Myles, June Jordan, Linda Besemer, Hothead Paisan, Finding Nemo, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Deborah Cass, SpongeBob, Shulamith Firestone, Marga Gomez, Toni Morrison, and Patti Smith. It recounts Sontag’s best-known works, from Against Interpretation to Regarding the Pain of Others, as well as her lesser-known plays, films and much-maligned novels. Apja kereskedő volt, aki 1938-ban egy kínai útja során tüdőbajban meghalt. 3$& ' (4&* ' 516 "! Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. In Johns, Susan found the same characteristic that she often appreciated in men: he was a master—a teacher, like Hutchins at Chicago, who could give her the “right way.” Although the book is a virtual kitchen sink of information about Sontag’s life, Moser seems to have started the project with certain expectations about Sontag that she does not live up to in his estimation. Her ideas at the time of a writer was someone interested in “everything.” Look at what we're doing to it! Le plus remarquable de ce témoignage réside dans la rage avec laquelle Susan Sontag affirme combattre ces métaphores, du fait que, selon elle, « la réputation même de cette maladie ajoutait aux souffrances de ceux et de celles qui en souffraient », déclenchant chez eux « honte » et même « dégoût » envers leur maladie. Obviously, whatever interpretation is, Sontag seems against it. Come on people, what the hell is wrong with your perpetual blindness ? Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2018. Susan Sontag photographed in her home 1979 ©Lynn Gilbert. This is what she was trying to do, inconsistently, with pop, and popular culture. . Please try your request again later. J'aime cette auteur. Ms. Sontag had the guts to say what was bothering her soul. The following article appeared in UChicago News on 12 January 2015:. These are choices made by those in power, in order to maintain power. Against Interpretation is a collection of critical essays written by Susan Sontag and published in book form in the early sixties in New York. This quip opens Susan Sontag’s seminal essay ‘Against Interpretation’, first published in 1964. No Kindle device required. In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag briefly introduces Plato’s mimetic theory, which “challenges art to justify itself” as the “imitation of an imitation” (Sontag 1). Except that I didn’t quite buy it. When we dispense with the interpretation of culture, we become its victims. Susan Sontag’s seminal mid-60s essay has come up several times at this site. Sontag simply failed to understand that All culture is a metaphor for violence. Susan Sontag. Is James Rosenquist’s massive painting “F-111” (1964) to be experienced merely as a surface? eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of Against Interpretation and Other Essays. As the only woman among the 1960s world of New York Jewish intellectuals, Sontag was both venerated and villainized, depicted as either a counter-cultural hero or a posturing pop celebrity. I will persevere but it is not a book for a good read. La compréhension est simple et vrai. In 1967, Susan Sontag declared that ‘there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation… this is a painful truth… the white race is the cancer of human history’. 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