ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag (b. 1934) was born in Arizona, but is especially associated with the New York intellectual and artistic 'scene'. She published a novel called The Benefactor in 1964, and in the same year became something of a celebrity when her essay 'Notes on Camp' was published in Partisan Review and, by a familiar process, picked up and exploited by the mass media. 'Camp' as defined by Miss Sontag was not so much a kind of art as a kind of artistic consumption, which converted conventionally 'bad' art (like Batman) into a source of refined pleasure by ignoring its intentions and relishing its style; but it had affiliations with pop art, happenings, underground movies, and other manifestations of the avant-garde. The 1960s saw a remarkable burgeoning of the avant-garde in America, and Miss Sontag was one of its most subtle and influential apologists, announcing the death of traditional elitist literary culture with all the skill and authority of someone well educated in that culture. 'Against Interpretation' is in fact less novel than it seems at first sight: the links with the aesthetics of Symbolism are clear. First published in the Evergreen Review in 1964, it was the title essay of her first collection of essays, published in America in 1697. Since then Miss Sontag has published a second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will (New York, 1969) and a novel, Death Kit (1968). CROSS REFERENCES: 20. Paul Valery
33. Leslie Fiedler 34. Alain Robbe-Grillet 48. Roland Barthes 50. Frank Kermode
WILLEM DE KOONING,a in an interview
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
