Tag: Susan Sontag
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The 1975’s Brief Inquiry
1. The 1975 “One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover… [W]hat perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to…
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Sontag v. Top-down Frames
The title of Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” is misleading, and regularly confuses readers who believe her “erotics of art” precludes interpretive dot-connecting and inference. This is not the case: the piece is more accurately titled “Against Allegorization,” or “Against Ideological Readings” — those hermeneutic approaches that set out to find “encoded” and symbolic meanings in a work…
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Origins of “Future Nausea”
1966, Susan Sontag, “Anthropologist as Hero” in Against Interpretation: “The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.” (also, 1999, William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories, 15:00 in: “I think we all have…
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Chekhov’s Gun and Red Herrings: Meaning, Rules, and Transgression in Storytelling
I. “If I think of somebody telling a story, I see a group of people huddled together, and around them a vast space, quite frightening.” — John Berger It’s probably important to start off by quickly distinguishing between a “story” and “literature,” at least in a way that is, if not universally true, at least…
Suspended Reason 