Book: Against Interpretation

Overview
Published in 1966, Against Interpretation collects Susan Sontag's early essays on art, film, theater, literature, and criticism, proposing a new sensibility for modern culture. Rather than forming a unified treatise, the book assembles interventions written across the early 1960s that share an impatience with reductive readings and a fascination with style, surface, and the immediate experience of art. Sontag argues that mid-century criticism, tethered to interpretive systems and moral allegory, estranges audiences from artworks by converting them into messages. The collection positions modern art’s experimentations, across cinema, happenings, avant-garde theater, and Pop, as not problems to be decoded but experiences to be undergone.

The Case Against Interpretation
The title essay advances Sontag’s most famous provocation: interpretation, especially in its Freudian and Marxist varieties, often violates art by subordinating form to content, turning complex objects into vehicles for ideas the critic already holds. She describes this as the revenge of the intellect upon art. What is needed is not the abolition of meaning but a shift in attention toward how art works on the senses, how it organizes perception, and how it alters consciousness. Her call for an erotics of art advocates description, formal attentiveness, and receptivity over hermeneutic conquest. In this framework, form is not ornamental; it is integral, often the very content of the work. The task is to recover the sensuous authority of art in a culture saturated with explanations.

Style, Sensibility, and the Modern
Across essays such as On Style and One Culture and the New Sensibility, Sontag reframes style as the record of choices that constitute a work, inseparable from its substance. She resists the moralistic suspicion that style is merely decorative or evasive, proposing instead that modern art’s rigor resides in its formal decisions. The new sensibility she sketches is pluralist and anti-hierarchical, collapsing boundaries between high and low, avant-garde and popular, European modernism and American mass culture. Artists who privilege surface, artifice, and materials are not trivial; they educate perception. Rather than demanding that art deliver edification or solace, Sontag celebrates its capacity to sharpen our senses and expand the available repertoire of feelings.

Maps of Mid-Century Culture
The collection ranges widely. Notes on Camp defines camp as a sensibility that esteems artifice, extravagance, and stylization, offering a taxonomy of taste that both recognizes a minority culture and forecasts the mainstreaming of irony. The Imagination of Disaster reads science fiction films as ritual responses to collective anxiety, at once mitigating fear and indulging fantasies of technological prowess. Essays on cinema and theater, among them pieces on Robert Bresson and the New Wave, advance a vocabulary for attending to rhythm, framing, performance, and tone. A study of happenings champions juxtaposition and immediacy over narrative closure, furthering Sontag’s preference for experiences that suspend interpretation and force attention to the present tense of art.

Impact and Tone
Against Interpretation helped reset the ambitions of criticism during a period of upheaval in the arts, equipping readers to meet modern works without reflexive paraphrase or suspicion. Sontag’s prose marries aphoristic clarity to polemical energy, but the goal is generous: to make space for more acute seeing and hearing. The collection insists that aesthetic experience is ethically significant not because art teaches lessons, but because it trains attention, refines feeling, and enlarges freedom. Its arguments continue to underwrite critical practices that privilege close looking, formal description, and responsiveness, and they anticipate recurring debates about the uses and limits of theory. Even as the book denounces the deadening effects of overinterpretation, it leaves criticism with a positive program: to honor the sensuous, to describe faithfully, and to let artworks breathe.