Against Interpretation: meeting art at the surface
Why explanation can become a screen between an artwork and the experience it offers.
Against Interpretation challenges criticism that treats an artwork chiefly as a container for a hidden message. Sontag argues that habitual decoding can flatten form, tone, rhythm, and the immediate force of an encounter.
The essay does not ask readers to stop thinking. It asks criticism to become more attentive to how art appears and acts, and less eager to replace the work with a summary of what it supposedly means.
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Artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and the unstable pleasure of taking style seriously.
Jane Austen begins with a polished certainty, then lets conversation expose everything it conceals.