Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag

Reading these essays was being in momentary contact with a brilliant mind. Susan Sontag has a confident and authoritative voice, drawing references from her extensive cultural knowledge base of film, novels, drama, philosophy, and more, bringing all these together with her carefully crafted essay writing.

I liked 'Against Interpretation,' and 'On Style' the most of all her essays. She refutes the reading of artworks as a text and content, which reduces style to pretty frivolous frills that unnecessarily hide content. This does not mean she supports purely formalistic approaches to art, but a going beyond the content/style dichotomy. 

"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous," she says, and "by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art." Content focused approaches that take the metaphor of art as text hide the awesomeness of artwork. "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."

I also enjoyed her 'Notes on Camp' (need another reading of this) and 'One Culture and the New Sensibility,' which also try to reconfigure dichotomies of high/low culture, literary-artistic/scientific culture.

Her writings on different art works and artists were an unique and interesting. When I already knew the reference she added more depth to my understanding (she calls Camus "the ideal husband of contemporary letters"), when I did not know the reference the ideas she communicated through these essays were enlightening nonetheless.

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