Against Interpretation

Sontag (1933-2004) was an American writer, intellectual, and political activist from New York who primarily wrote critical essays, which were published in collections including Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).

After graduating from North Hollywood High School when she was 15 years old, she studied at the University of California, Berkeley. She then transferred to the University of Chicago, where she studied philosophy, history, and literature, receiving her bachelor of arts when she was 18. She taught at the University of Connecticut for a year prior to initially enrolling at Harvard University for a graduate degree in literature and then changing to philosophy and theology. She started her doctoral research at Harvard after earning her master of arts there, and she was later awarded an American Association of University Women’s fellowship to St Anne’s College, Oxford. However, she later transferred to the University of Paris, known as the Sorbonne, where she experienced a formative time of her life.

Sontag’s long-term involvement in the humanities explains her passionate descriptions of and arguments around the arts and art criticism. Sontag’s experiences with other people also inform her approach to this subject matter, since she studied under various well-known scholars at the universities she attended. These scholars argued for their own perspectives in their time, and Sontag was thus encouraged to join the critical discourse on interpretation by voicing her own thoughts.

Despite this, Sontag primarily considered herself a fiction writer. Her early novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, were not as popular as her essays, but her later novels and short fiction achieved greater success. Her stance as an anti-war activist and a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, as a bisexual woman herself, also positioned her as a progressive thinker of the time.