He adds that overstand is taken from Wayne C. Booth’s Critical Understanding. Now if we were talking DC it would be a tough call. Two months ago I wrote an analysis of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”where I argued that, rather than being opposed to all interpretation, as some believe, Sontag was […], […] Sontag famously wrote about the need to break away from the traditional impulse to interpret works of art as if they were […], […] HTMLGIANT dissekerar en av Sontags mer kända essäer: 25 Points: Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ […], 25 Points: Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” | HTMLGIANT, Brent DiCrescenzo’s 2000 Pitchfork review of Radiohead’s, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s affective fallacy, as well as minutes 6:50–9:40 in this clip, Two Problems with a Neuroaesthetic Theory of Interpretation, A bit more on Susan Sontag and “Against Interpretation” | HTMLGIANT, A bit more on Susan Sontag and “Against Interpretation” | GIANT READER, The Case for Writers to Play Video Games | Full Stop, Susan Sontag skrev 17198 mejl och Benjamin Moser har läst dem | bearbooks. And holy shit, did these guys just say this about a piece of art? Didn’t mean to suggest you used it pejoratively–I was just flipping the phrase, because it’s often use negatively. ps. Looking closely at an artwork’s form helps me see how other artists are working. Standard and The Logic of Naturalism” and “Postmodernist Fiction” again Extreme Indeed, the copyright page, title page, and everything else are present at the end, after the main text. Most important—if importance has any connection to the power of a critical movement to make us recognize the world with new eyes—we see the same dependence on authorial intention in much feminist criticism. It seems wrongheaded to conflate “intentional fallacy”–a specific term that responded to a specific kind of criticism–with more sophisticated intentionalist approaches grounded in formal literary analysis, yet people confuse the two all the time, here and elsewhere. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. That’s why I became a blogger / PhD student. access is the close reading of the text. What if I say, “The tank seems less a phallus and more a fixture of the landscape. Yes indeed, the low window into and out of the audience with the cardinal, and the lecturing finger in sheeted silhouette, and the hands lifting the mud in the foreground, and the cardinal–“Why should you be happy?”–quoting Origen to inspire caution extra ecclesiam (Britannica says that, when still a young man, “[a] rash resolve led [Origen] to castrate himself that he might work unhindered in the instruction of women”) — all carefully chosen. (Which doesn’t mean that it’s bad, per se—just that it isn’t experimental/ag. In 1982, FSG published A Susan Sontag … Formal analysis is necessary! Aristotle is “boring”? Sontag is syncing up “interpretation” with “allegory.” To interpret art, Sontag argues, is to first assume that all art is allegorical. Sontag is interested only in the artwork in itself—in exactly what it appears to be. Interpretation, we can see, consists of two actions: From here, Sontag proceeds to examine where that impulse to translate or transform came from. (And if the tank is supposed to be taken as a symbol of something, we should be able to read it as such formally—”objectively”—normatively.). And I agree with him, because I almost failed geometry, most literary criticism bores the fuck out of me, and I WANT art to be mystical and illusory and emotional and wild and opaque in spots and contradictory and transcendant, which is what the most durable art has always been. That’s my critique of a lot of experimental art, in fact—that a lot of what gets touted as experimental or avant-garde is actually pretty derivative/reactionary. But of course this kind of metaphorical interpretation would catch on in film criticism, starting in the 1980s, if not the 1970s—Lacanian psychoanalysis is heavily rooted in it. Sontag traces the threads that art critics weave to knit art objects to a symbolic economy, wherein they gain a certain type of meaning and, consequently, value. 3. It’s a brilliant bit of deconstruction that’s still very critical, I think (mainly by being satirical). u can edit your own comments any time when u are signed in to Disqus There is always a reason why a photographer may self censor and this essay will explore this by looking at ‘Will Stacey 's’ Photographs, The Relationship of Photographs, History, and Memory Sontag concludes section 7 by discussing film, which she claims often eludes metaphorical interpretation for a very important reason: Slavoj Žižek hadn’t burst onto the scene yet. One doesn’t have to look into the head, because we have the artwork, and artworks record intentions. I wonder what it would be like to have a body of such proportion. Once we start talking about it, we of course start differing from it. Sontag looks to differentiate the content from the art, judging the value of the art by the art itself rather than what it represents. I’ve arranged them such that they refer to other texts. Throwing paint at a canvas might represent the thrower’s inner experience only occlusively, especially compared to what’s revealed about, say, that forced interaction of the paint’s texture with that of the canvas. (I don’t deny that one can have any response one wishes, I just don’t identify those responses with critical interpretation. work depends on the honesty of the critic. |Mon, Sep 5 |Labor Day Holiday (no classes) | The translation of X to A a) needn’t be a rigid commitment. Rather than necessarily an imposition of the interpreter, discernment of “content” can be discovery of what appears. I added a link to an informative website about ice cream; maybe they thought I was spamming. What’s important to see here is Sontag’s argument as to how interpretation is done in the present moment. Then he expands this reading to all novels postmodern, cut-and-pasting his “ontological spin” interpretations. The internet is full of this kind of criticism. (It’s worth mentioning that Chris is also demonstrating a weak version of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s affective fallacy—valuing the text according to the subjective effects it has on him. Susan Sontag's essay "On Style" (Against Interpretation) contains many passages to warm an aging aesthete's heart. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. The problem with the supposed binary they’ve created is that it’s rarely as neat as they claim, you know? The similarity of reader and author–the conditions for the possibility of their horizons fusing–isn’t what I was arguing against; to the contrary, it’s only because there are similarities (like a somewhat-shared language) that the reader and author are, as it were, in the same place and time (with respect to the artwork). (It’s debatable how strongly he endorsed this position, though, since his own writing contradicts it at times. And maybe I’ll try my hand at writing some more subjective / less objectively analytical stuff! Sontag may like that or she may not, but that’s a subjective question of taste, and quite different from what she’s been discussing so far. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1964), in: Against Interpretation and other Essays, New York: Dell, 1966. But the description of the effect should be rooted in a description of the form. Analyzing an artwork’s formal structure, for instance, gives great insight into what the author intended in making the piece. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Sorry I missed your reply. ps. Rather than treating artworks as opportunities to differ extravagantly. I wish I had a soda pop for every person I’ve heard say “Barthes isn’t just a critic, he’s a poet.” Chris Higgs, too, seems to make no distinction between criticism and art (they’re just the same). The companion problem is, why have art at all? about is that the artist wanted to create something. On-line books store on Z-Library | Z-Library. It is an experience, a sensual, emotional, and spiritual interaction. She has written novels like The Benefactor (1964) and Death Kit (1968) . I think his mistake is less formal and more cultural. Everything else is categorized as (subjective) response. Going back to the sauna, as Guido is being led to the cardinal, there’s a guy, between the Mexican-divorce guy and the producer himself, dressed in black and a black hat, holding a jacket (?) (I do not think it *is* more likely, only that it might appear to be lower-hanging fruit.) It is interested only in the meanings the artist intended. The author is there in the text, tracing and traced, “historically effective”. To what do they attribute the disparate efficacies of forms which can be described in very similar terms? consciously tried to deform rigid conventions, tried to find new ways of New York: Picador, 2001. ‘Against Interpretation’ remains challenging to art writers. A video essay providing an overview of particular arguments in Susan Sontag's landmark essay "Against Interpretation" (1964) and illustrating their… She received her B.A. Judith Fetterley’s “resisting reader” can come into being only if there is something to resist.(263). Most pages have a smatter of words in the center. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art. Does she mean any and all interpretation, as my fellow contributor Chris Higgs recently argued? The art’s content is merely what it is. The urge to interpret, she argues, is “the revenge of the intellect upon art,” the revenge of the mind against … I love it! So better use the concept of worldview (Barthes uses “ideology”). . Is that the ‘clear meaning’ of the Bergman still-frame or merely my ‘interpretation?’ Given I don’t actually believe it, I must say it to be neither. Sorry to take so long to reply to this. I am reminded of Žižek’s commentary on the relationship between toilets and ideology, an extension or elaboration or corruption of Kristeva’s theory of the abject, of course, and instantly I begin wondering about the cultural significance of a toilet seat so small as to be unable to comfortably accommodate a person of my figure, which is to say an average figure for a man in his mid-thirties who exercises half-an-hour to forty-five minutes a day and eats fairly well balanced meals and is only slightly overweight, and I begin to worry for those people who are obese, who seriously could not fit themselves on this tiny seat. Indeed, understood with the nuance that translators bring to their craft and art, “translation” is a successful way of thinking about ‘encountering surfaces’. (Harry Potter‘s aesthetic, for instance, has nothing to do with that book having been a bestseller.). Kill your wrists & escape the capitalist barf engulfing us!” Cool, right? She writes her views on how she feels the overuse of interpretation diminishes the value of any given art piece by redundantly searching for meaning that might not even be there and making the work blend into a category rather than stand as it’s own individual piece. So when we say Shakespeare, we mean the body of work that includes the Sonnets, King Lear, As You Like It etc. Abstract: This essay reflects on the relationship of photographs, history, and memory based on a found and mutilated photo album. One can reference earlier, symbolic texts and still not intend a symbolic reading; there are ways to block that interpretation. The Sontag famously concludes her essay with this line (section 10): In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. One current trend in lit studies is the use of formalist approaches to inform the investigation of social, cultural, and/or historical topics. (I thought you could get an email from disqus whenever someone replied to one of your comments, no matter how far back in the master-thread that blogicle is. For instance, the tank rumbles in at night, and its disruptive loudness is very important there. See my series on the differences between Concepts and Constraints for more along those lines (and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the distinction I’m drawing!). Film was (at that time) a relatively new art form; Most people (at that time) were still thinking of films as “just movies”—as simple entertainment, and not art; A third argument, which I will claim as very important. Hi Joseph, not sure I’m following you here. I tend to think that when people do metaphorical criticism, they’re really making new artworks. on the life of Pushkin (he only managed to write the first part), I’m Adam! Against Interpretation, and Other Essays is a collection of twenty-seven essays and reviews which Susan Sontag, once the darling of the New York avant garde, originally published between 1962 … Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. What exactly does this mean? I see that process as a type of interpretation, although I suppose it doesn’t require a metaphorical or allegorical interpretation. “Most criticism is analytic.” My idea of ‘criticism’ is rooted (I suppose) in antiquity, so I would agree. 3 “Against Interpretation,” a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and … And I think it’s a major mistake if they try to “own art” by claiming their opponents don’t love art, too. And I guess some people are probably tired of your polite antagonism toward Chris, but as someone who generally thinks it’s very hard to make interesting content without someone to write against, I find it totally fun. Or it’s some combination of the two. I’d never seen a 1960s Italian film before—I don’t think I’d ever seen a 1960s European art film—and I didn’t know how to read it. Interpretation of arts and literature has gone to an extent that it has taken shape of a discipline and has grown as a methodology and an art itself. Daniel Mendelsohn, etc. But some of those apples are. form of the work is not the product of her free will: it’s the culture But the reader has an own experience. To be able to do that discovery, one must be informed, and be able to read the form. McHale’s more careful than that in the book (I don’t know the paper). So I agree that it’s necessary to discriminate between ‘validity in general’ (anything that doesn’t prevent others’ attention to the artwork goes) and ‘critical validity’ (what you have to say about the artwork that might be useful to my experience of the artwork, or I to yours). Thought and/or action that are linguistic are metaphorical, however much they thematize or disclose metaphor’s problematic nature. First, a selection: Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. Why is “latent content” not a valid experience of “surface” or “appearance”? (Cf. It helps to expand the text, more than reduce the text […]. (I’m drawing heavily on Knapp/Michaels here.). I believe I’ve made my point (or provided sufficient antagonism to provoke some debate), so let’s return to the 1960s and to Sontag. It then attaches allegorical meaning to those elements (and therefore to the artwork). And then I had to knock over a fast food joint and escort some young women to Florida. As is how it interrupts dramatically intense domestic moments. I reread Peter Rabinowicz’s essay “Actual Reader and Authorial Reader,” today, in which he observes how necessary “authorial reading” [i.e., intentional reading] is for so many reader-based theories of reading. OK, so no author. The purpose of the critic, Sontag is arguing, is not to obscure the artwork, or to argue that it means something other than what it is. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The form of a Shakespearean sonnet includes an end-rhyme pattern, but the pattern is not fully present in any single sonnet, and each sonnet’s rhymes are prior in another way to that pattern. 28. So I think that what Sontag is highlighting here is that authorial intention does in fact matter. And the author is just another reader. Sontag goes on to name select works by those critics whom she believes is doing this kind of work: Erwin Panofsky, Northrop Frye, Pierre Francastel, Roland Barthes, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Manny Farber, Dorothy Van Ghent, Randall Jarrell (all, she hastens to add, only on occasion). Your boy lost. Artworks are always instructional in that way. She likens such criticism to the attempt to make the world something other than it is: The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Or is it?” So begins Susan Sontag's introductory essay to the book Women, a collection of photographs by Annie Leibovitz. And you’re supposed to be a literary person? That said, it remains incorrect for critics to approach artworks with the a priori assumption that they are symbolic or allegorical. I won’t disagree that his larger argument is problematic. Either the author determines what the meaning of a text is, and we’re trying (imperfectly) to figure that out. That being said, greatest Marvel superhero in theory, and in a few brief glimmering moments of perfection = the Hulk, and in practice = the X-Men as a team (individually, they are insufferable), I think. thought it sounded a bit like the historico-revisionist fantasy that was No, ha ha, that’s one of my little jokes. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. For now, I’ll leave you with this…, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ePQKD9iBfU. Of course, this confusion might source from my own rusty knowledge of theory. (The GOP figured out long ago that the postmodernist tendency to render everything as endless subjectivity works out excellently for them. She wants to find it by means of an erotics, which I would argue looks like formalist interpretation (obviously I’m using interpretation there differently than how she does—more like how Knapp/Michaels do). A poet might perceive herself to be utterly radical in her artistic project (that’s her authorial intention), while the worldview presented in the formal qualities of the text could be good ol’ conservative humanism in a fancy dress. Do you think literary criticism is some recent phenomenon invented to “bore” you? But each word in the sentence “I should pause here to note that I entirely agree with Sontag.” is not, fails to reproduce, and stands only as a translation of what it’s a word for. This is what Wimsatt and Beardsley meant. : “The report of some readers . I like your distinction of “critical validity”: what you have to say about the artwork that might be useful to my experience of the artwork, or I to yours, The key word there is experience. In the latter, Sontag argues that the new approach to criticism and aesthetics neglects the sensuous impact of art, replacing it with tame intellectual interpretations and … For instance, I just saw Django Unchained, and was curious about the insert shots where Dr. King Schultz is shown pouring beers in the saloon. Despite the peril of his situation he moves comfortably to the bar and pours two beers while talking to and looking at Django. But I also find him very contradictory on this point. The aesthetics of an object are not identical to the use a culture makes of an object. Then again, words change. Susan Sontag Against Interpretation 1964. I like how in your first paragraph, you followed these sentences: Okay, what I meant when I wrote “Authorial Intention” is that a specific human being (Author) had a specific purpose (intention) with the artifact he made. This discussion will be chaired by F.… Which is to say he’s wrong about the social or even aesthetic significance of those texts? My critique of criticism is ultimately non-formalist. The first time I read Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1964), I found it exhilarating. Can’t really speak to the Higgs biz; know nothing about it but the recent how-to articles. You and I should continue talking! The author is somewhat traceable, and sometimes (not that often, for me) that effort illumines the reader’s experience of the text. I also think it’s a problem if any group of people think their approach to art is the best way forever and for all time. (I also don’t claim to even possess that ability.). For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms — the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film. Note also how Sontag has been arguing throughout the essay that we should take appearances seriously. etc. I read that as his realization that a critical response somehow needs to be grounded in the artwork, and that some things are in fact artworks while other things are not. Criticism–even effect-in-metaphor; even telling you that X really means ‘A’–never “replace[s]”. And translation of X to A b) can be as non-impositive as ‘contact with surface’. This is the can of flesh-eating intestinal worms that Chris—and anyone who prioritizes subjective criticism—opens up. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. Georg Lukacs’ Marxist analysis of Balzac depends on the distinction between what Balzac wanted to see and what he really did see. This is my philosophy project for mr. Erickson. But that said, I realize that they may seem more transparent and “content-full” to audiences. Why is it so difficult to understand that the brain is capable of experiencing art mystically and wildly–right brain, intuitive–and then, perhaps in a later reading or even during the same reading critiquing art analytically–left brain, logical? Its first two essays–“Against Interpretation” and “On Style”–are so fascinating and so lucid that I am afraid my commentary can only impose a gloss of half-understood meaning on top of Sontag’s clear structure. . The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. Unlike most literary critics, Sontag believes that literary criticism is growing increasingly destructive towards the very works of art that they, supposedly, so … But he can’t admit to doing this. Sorry to take so long to get to this. . People are generally accepting of multiple approaches–post-structuralists get along with formalists, etc. How might an artwork /show/ itself to be symbolic or allegorical? Like a movie that begins sans credits. He [McHale] found one passage (Did Pökler have sex with his own daughter?) I’d never accuse Chris of not loving art. That is to say, symbols and allegories can be systematically built into an artwork’s form. Form for Sontag is synonymous with appearance. If formalism is neither a means to an end, nor the ‘mere explication’ … well, if it’s not a means to any end, then my point is unnecessary. I guess that’s it: “criticism”, like “philosophy” and “art” in their ways, is ‘taking place(s) in conversation’ (particularly, ‘conversation about art’). 1. It attempts to find in every artwork “latent content,” which the critic then claims as the artwork’s “true meaning.” (This is entirely in keeping with the summary we laid out in Point 8.). And along those lines he says that all readers are critics, and that their task is to describe or mirror artworks. They revolted against the sloppy psychologism I don’t think I could have constructed a reading of it if I’d tried. . I look forward to continuing to rebut the monocausality of the artist’s intentions in one’s experience of an artwork. Only thing we can be sure Though there are other ways of approaching it. –the utility of that distinction of intent just doesn’t seem to me to go far. I’m just one of “those guys” who is naturally skeptical of theories concerning the abstract or as-yet-not-fully-quantifiable such as ideas, concepts, language, and fields which deal in these. Social Constructivism then. (it’s an artificial object, not a piece of nature). 2 mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. What does Higgs mean by ‘to read’? since everything else in the world is beginning to come due right now John Milius is a different filmmaker than Bergman. (See 11:30 into this clip.) You should make a good faith attempt to shed light on the work, and you should do so for works you feel are actually worthwhile. Susan Sontag, geborene Rosenblatt, (geb.16. Susan Sontag addresses this in her essay Against Interpretation, which was published in 1966 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The academic essay is always written with a definite purpose in mind: to convince people about a specific point. Sontag claims that “films have not been overrun by interpreters” for three other reasons: […] there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. Changing tacks anyway…]. School. (I also think most viewers will agree that they are watching an early 60s film made by Ingmar Bergman, though you never know. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. “Aw, gee, Jeremy, you’re making me blush!” — Okay, okay, I hear you, I get it. The possibility of meaning is in fact infinite, but it’s a smaller infinity, like Natural numbers is a smaller set than the Real numbers, or a ray is a smaller infinity than the plane it’s contained on. Here we have the start of a few arguments that Sontag will maintain throughout the essay: Still, what does she mean by interpretation? If I can jump in here–most literary formalist criticism today is not a means to an end, or the mere explication of a text to reveal its parts. I might overvalue debate, and I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, but I do think it healthy and good. 5. get to “Against Theory” for a post some time? I’m going to be working on this stuff for a while. Susan Sontag. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. 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