Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

By analyzing the content of art rather than merely experiencing it, we “set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’”—everything necessarily pointing at something else. In order to liberate ourselves from this diminishing way of seeing, she suggests valuing transparence instead. “Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of th... See more

I went into Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” thinking we would disagree, but her take is more nuanced. She’s against interpreting an artist’s intentions to make it fit your own narrative; but she’s for analysis of the thing itself (it’s form and the sensation it evokes). By the end, she pleas for a “dictionary of forms,” which feels like the

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