Against Interpretation

Twentieth-century American intellectual, writer, and political activist Susan Sontag initially published her essay “Against Interpretation” in 1964 prior to its publication alongside other essays of hers in 1966. The essay is a work of literary criticism that is concerned primarily with the field of aesthetics, and it subsequently became a finalist for the National Book Award’s Arts and Letters category. As its title suggests, its core argument is critical of contemporary tendencies to focus on artistic interpretation in lieu of pure experience.

This guide uses the scanned PDF copy of Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) provided online by the University of Alberta. All quotations contained in this guide shall use page numbers that correspond with this copy of the text.

The essay opens by contrasting “[t]he earliest experience of art” as “an instrument of ritual” (95) with “[t]he earliest theory of art [as] mimesis, imitation of reality” (95). Sontag explains that Greek philosophical approaches to art strictly entailed viewing it as a mimetic form of imitation—a lie. She elaborates on Plato and Aristotle’s contrasting notions of art’s value, explaining that the former believed art to be useless while the latter thought it to be cathartic and thus emotionally valuable.