Against Interpretation
Susan Sontag · 1966
"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 case against
Sontag legislates more than she argues; the essays are verdicts delivered from a great height, and the famous call for an erotics of art is itself a thesis about how to interpret. Half the collection now requires footnotes: happenings, Marat/Sade, the downtown ephemera of 1964. You admire the sensibility while the objects of it fade.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
