It’s pretty “thrilling.” And I think Fellini intended that thrill—that’s what he filmed the scene that way, and not in a more mundane way. This website, and the indy-lit scene in general, is full of this kind of criticism—just read the blurbs on the backs of most small press books. Most pages have a smatter of words in the center. In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, pp. ), we can still ask “what did they mean when they wrote this?” And even if we never can get it 100% right, we can still try and figure it out. Then he expands this reading to all novels postmodern, cut-and-pasting his “ontological spin” interpretations. Having dismissed that approach, Sontag calls for “an erotics of art.” What does she mean by this? Even Tristram Shandy was postmodern! Sometimes there is lineation, sometimes there is not. . But then he also says they should do whatever they want with them (including burn them). on the life of Pushkin (he only managed to write the first part), 7. When I first saw 8 1/2, I was unable to produce an objective/normative account of the film. To what do they attribute the disparate efficacies of forms which can be described in very similar terms? Am I critic yet? As does the “metaphorical interpretation” Sontag’s railing against in “Against Interpretation” (i.e., allegorical readings are not interpretation, but responses). I think Against Interpretation is my favorite work of philosophy/literary theory I’ve read so far. Whatever it means!”); meanwhile, his critical commitments, as actually stated, have nothing in fact to do with Susan Sontag. Sontag famously concludes her essay with this line (section 10): In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. That gives me options when I go to make my own artworks. Cheers, ADJ. . According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. We needn’t concern Obviously, you do not have access to his mind, so it’s better to be agnostic about it (How can you not be?). 19. 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!). Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. (She likens this also to “[recovering] our senses […] to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”). Sontag is entirely opposed to that approach to criticism. For one thing, it’s pretty fast paced right before that, while Guido is walking there. The manifest/latent distinction of certain Freudian studies, for instance, collapses if we don’t have a manifest meaning to begin with. He hasn’t responded yet. 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. As for whether I like any particular ones, I love William Bowers’s “I Went and Saw Me Some Spider-Man” so much, I reprinted in Requited Journal. 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 (?) But I watched it several more times, and I watched dozens of other 1960s European art films, and now 8 1/2 makes a great deal of sense to me. Sontag is interested only in the artwork in itself—in exactly what it appears to be. But I’d have to think more about it. His adoration for art is written all over everything he does, and is one of his most endearing qualities—it’s why a lot of people (myself included) enjoy and look forward to his writing. It then selects one or two elements of the artwork. These days, in sharp contrast to my childhood self, I’m most excited about Grant Morrison’s Superman stories. He’s not collegial at all )pretending to be nice when one is really being passive-aggressive is not an example of collegiality). All the conditions of modern life – its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. Following this, Sontag argues that, today, the motivation for metaphorical interpretation is no longer “piety toward the troublesome text” but rather “an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances”: The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. Or it’s some combination of the two. Once we start talking about it, we of course start differing from it. 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. For now, I’ll leave you with this…, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ePQKD9iBfU. (“What does he meant by that?” &c.) And even if you did, from diaries and suchlike, you would commit the biographical fallacy. [That last paragraph is a good example of how using examples can be more efficient than such attempts as mine to describe.] That sentence remains, IMHO, one of the worst and stupidest claims I have ever seen an art critic write. He cites the passage as an example of sous rature, which he claims as an aesthetic device that pomo authors use to trouble the ontological stability of the text. I’ve been busy rereading it since Xmas, and want to take this chance to set down some thoughts regarding it. Whether you (or I, or Chris) like it or not, Wimsatt and Beardsley are taken very seriously by a great many people, and were hardly doofuses—I mean, you can’t just dismiss them that way and have any effect. But some day I’ll look at Bordwell and Thompson There’s space for multiple competing interpretations, but a valid interpretation needs to support itself with precise close reading, without that it’s just a faux-interpretation, a “response”. A tank is going to mean different things in different artworks; it has to. I might overvalue debate, and I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, but I do think it healthy and good. Artworks are always instructional in that way. There, Chris spends most of the 2059 words writing about what he was doing when he read the book (similar to an Ain’t It Cool movie review): With a roiling stomach, after six hours zipping across I-10 from our Magnolia Heights neighborhood in Tallahassee to the Lower Garden District in New Orleans, presumably attributable to the consumption of fast food, an uncharacteristic activity for me, I snatch Skin Horse from my bag, rush to the restroom in our hotel room, plop down on the toilet only to find my body is too big for the little seat. It means don’t deal with the author as a human being. Susan Sontag By Group 10 Rebecca Prince Kay Richards Louisa Reece Helena Rushworth Here are some of my own favorite critics in this regard—critics who taught me to do the kind of formal analysis that Sontag is calling for: (No surprise, my answer to the above questions is Russian Fucking Formalism, and its heirs. For Sontag’s argument to be consistent, she shouldn’t care whether the artist intended the symbol or not; she should just claim, a priori, that any and all metaphorical intention is wrongheaded, or at least irrelevant to intention. I have no real interest at the moment in judging whether or not she’s right about that. He found one passage (Did Pökler have sex with his own daughter?) (Which doesn’t mean that it’s bad, per se—just that it isn’t experimental/ag. And the author is just another reader. All artworks are not crudely symbolic or allegorical, but the residue of action is not limited in effect by crudities of its apprehension. tags: criticism, interpretation. Here’s what Chris implores, by way of contrast: Instead of blocking a text with interpretation, it can be opened by observation, description, and participation. I don’t think an incompatibility between consistency/coherence and messiness obtains far in the case of art, while, in the case of the art of criticism, championing messiness self-contradictorily is hardly ‘critical’. But interpretation is not concerned with the full scope of that. To be able to do that discovery, one must be informed, and be able to read the form. Susan Sontag addresses this in her essay Against Interpretation, which was published in 1966 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cheers, yourself. This is my philosophy project for mr. Erickson. *It might be better to use the term “author” to mean a specific body of work, paratexts included. Aristotle is “boring”? Chris says the author doesn’t matter because he either doesn’t believe in meaning/communication or he doesn’t care about meaning/communiucation, depending on which day of the week it is. But when I sit down to write as a critic, I like analyzing shit and being rational and rigorous. I guess that’s it: “criticism”, like “philosophy” and “art” in their ways, is ‘taking place(s) in conversation’ (particularly, ‘conversation about art’). ps. : “The report of some readers . But what creates the symbolic meaning, or the reference, is the way those elements are structured in the new text. 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 instead opposed to “metaphorical interpretation”—to critics who interpret artworks metaphorically or allegorically. And we’ll get a beer if you’re ever in L.A.! ]�'���āu�}��n���0���X�8�*�q�E�����M#鄰d�tX�nQ3��[k�\/Kd�8�8 &&9����K/ц-�s1|��b�4�a�`. [2] She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Granted. Supposing that one is before the artwork-in-itself arrogates as much “content” to one’s point of view as do “symbol” or “allegory”. The problem with Higgs is that he’s too fast-and-loose with this terms, presents sloppy arguments and then conveniently claims his sloppiness is intentional when people call him out on it (in other words, Higgs–unlike a real intellectual–can never admit when he’s wrong and/or learn from someone else), and is generally close-minded. This meaning is different from the meaning that the artwork really has (and which is clear). So how about it, Chris? The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Sontag, Susan. McHale especially! This is my philosophy project for mr. Erickson. It was her first collection of essays on the arts and contemporary culture. 3. ps. (Extreme relativism / solipsism). Higgs routinely performs analysis while denying to perform analysis. 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. Though there is much to say, 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). 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. The link between this process of critical validation and the market for art works, while unspoken, haunts the essay. They take time! (It’s debatable how strongly he endorsed this position, though, since his own writing contradicts it at times. Were I making a film, a formalist reading of another film helps me decide what I want to do. More than anything I’m looking to have a good conversation/debate about it. I was going to include some writing along those lines above, but it was already over-long. 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? Formal analysis is necessary! What use is a thorough evaluation of a work’s form if there is no subsequent mention or consideration of the results of the artist’s efforts: the effect the art has upon the audience, by way of its form? Last Year at Marienbad [1961] Dir. 304 pp. The author is somewhat traceable, and sometimes (not that often, for me) that effort illumines the reader’s experience of the text. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. Thought and/or action that are linguistic are metaphorical, however much they thematize or disclose metaphor’s problematic nature. Didn’t mean to suggest you used it pejoratively–I was just flipping the phrase, because it’s often use negatively. The earliest theory of art, that “dominant elements” without uttering a word about what the artist wanted Adam, what do you come up with pace reading without understanding or interpreting (even in the crude sense of code-breaking)? It includes the Which may be interesting and even significant—one might have a religious experience, or a psychological breakdown. 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. Anyway, that’s She gives the following example: The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Analysis Of Against Interpretation By Susan Sontag 1066 Words | 5 Pages does it mean for a work of art to have value, and how is its value determined in the first place? As is how it interrupts dramatically intense domestic moments. Among the buildings, roadways and posts, it appears as an indicator that war has come to stay.” (I don’t actually believe that.) Or the reader determines what the meaning is, via a variety of means. OK, so no author. (I do not think it *is* more likely, only that it might appear to be lower-hanging fruit.) I had the idea that I should try making Chris’s argument for him, see what I could come up with… :), [This might be the point where you tell me to just go read a book or something, but here goes…] 3. ... and on the cult of interpretation that it has spawned. …No, I joke. (“Like a movie that begins sans credits.”) If an artwork is symbolic or allegorical, then the critic will be able to discern that from the artwork’s appearance. Analyzing an artwork’s formal structure, for instance, gives great insight into what the author intended in making the piece. When I talked about what Wimsatt meant, I was talking about his academic persona. How could one? Let me put this reaction “against” Sontag (and against Adam, a little) in a, um, smaller nutshell: Sontag’s “surface” is a matter of cognition–of experience qua experience (and not brute physics)–in Nietzsche’s “sense” of interpretation, discard that meaning though she finds it useful to do. 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