Against Interpretation: and Other Essays Free

FREE AGAINST INTERPRETATION: AND OTHER ESSAYS PDF

However, your assignment doesn't have to be a hair-pulling, frazzled all-nighter. In the middle, you'll find the meat. Your introduction is like the top bun announcing the subject, your supporting paragraphs are the beef in the middle, and your conclusion is the bottom bun, supporting everything. Who, after all, would eat a burger composed only of bread and beef? Each part needs to be present: A soggy or missing bun would cause your fingers to slip immediately into the beef without being able to hold and enjoy the burger. But if your burger had no beef in the middle, you'd be left with two dry pieces of bread. Your thesis statement could read: "Information technology has revolutionized the way we work. The final sentences of your introduction, then, would be a mini-outline of what your essay will cover. Don't use an outline form, but explain briefly all the key points you intend to discuss in narrative form. These would include well-researched and logical points that support your thesis. Bellevue explains that your supporting paragraphs should provide rich, vivid imagery, or Against Interpretation: And Other Essays and specific supporting details, depending on your topic. A Against Interpretation: And Other Essays supporting paragraph for the technology topic, discussed previously, could draw on current events. In its Jan. The younger, hipper, agency, by contrast, had Against Interpretation: And Other Essays with Facebook Inc. You could use this news story to illustrate how technology—and a need for workers who understand it and Against Interpretation: And Other Essays able to use it—is taking over the world and is changing entire industries. Just as a hamburger needs a durable bottom bun to contain all the ingredients inside, your essay needs a strong conclusion to support and buttress your points. The closing arguments section of a trial takes place when the prosecution attempts to strengthen the evidence she presented to the jury. Even though the prosecutor likely provided solid and compelling arguments and evidence during the trial, it isn't until the closing arguments that she ties it all together. In the same way, you'll restate your main points in the conclusion in reverse order of how you listed them in your introduction. Some sources call this an upside-down Against Interpretation: And Other Essays The intro was a triangle that was right-side up, where you started with a short, razor sharp point—your hook—which then fanned out slightly to your topic sentence and broadened further with your mini-outline. The conclusion, by contrast, is an upside-down triangle that starts by broadly reviewing the evidence—the points you made in your supporting paragraphs—and then Against Interpretation: And Other Essays to your topic sentence and a restatement of your hook. In this way, you've logically explained your points, restated your main idea, and left readers with a zinger that hopefully convinces them of your point of view. Bullock, Richard. Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. By using ThoughtCo, you accept our. Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag

Against Interpretation is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style," and the eponymous essay "Against Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. In effect, she wrote, interpretation had become "the intellect's revenge upon art. Sontag is strongly averse to what she considers to be contemporary interpretation, that is, an overabundance of importance placed upon the content or meaning of an artwork rather than being keenly alert to the sensuous aspects of a given work and developing a descriptive vocabulary for how it appears and how it does whatever it does. Reverting to a more primitive and sensual, almost magical experience of art is what Sontag desires; even though that is Against Interpretation: And Other Essays impossible due to the thickened layers of hermeneutics that surround interpretation of art and that have grown to be recognised and respected. To Sontag, modernity means a loss of sensory experience and she believes Against Interpretation: And Other Essays corroboration with her theory of the damaging nature of criticism that the pleasure of art is diminished by such overload of the senses. In this way, Sontag asserts that inevitably, the modern style of interpretation separates form and content in a manner that damages an artwork and one's own sensorial appreciation of a piece. In a contemporary review of the book, Benjamin DeMott of Against Interpretation: And Other Essays New York Times praised Against Interpretation as "a vivid bit of living history here and now, and at the end of the sixties it may well rank among the invaluable cultural chronicles of these years. Though they bear the stamp of their time, Sontag was remarkably prescient; her project of analysing popular culture as well as high culture, the Doors as well as Dostoevsky, is now common practice throughout the educated world. And the artists and intellectuals she discusses — Nietzsche, Camus, Godard, Barthes etc — demonstrate that she knew which horses to back. Anker argue that the title essay from Sontag's collection has played an important role in the field of postcritiquea movement within literary criticism and cultural studies that attempts to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critiquecritical theoryand ideological criticism. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Against Interpretation First edition. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 30 January The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 14, Retrieved April 14, The Independent. Anker, Rita Felski Critique and Postcritique. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Works by Susan Sontag. Letter from Venice. Sontag: Her Life and Work. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn Against Interpretation: And Other Essays edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. First edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Definition and Examples of Evaluation Essays Sign in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays Facebook Sign in options. Join Goodreads. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error Against Interpretation: And Other Essays book. Refresh and try Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for Against Interpretation: And Other Essays us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world Against Interpretation: And Other Essays in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings. As if there were any other. The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of later readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities, that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to See more, to Hear more, to Feel more. Art is not only about something; it is something. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art. Honor, status, personal courage—the values of an aristocratic military class? But this is not what the Iliad is about. It would be more correct to say, as Simone Weil does, that the Iliad—as pure an example of the tragic vision as one can find—is about the emptiness and arbitrariness of the world, the ultimate meaninglessness of all moral Against Interpretation: And Other Essays, and the terrifying rule of death and inhuman force. The story of Oedipus is tragic insofar as it exhibits the brute opaqueness of the world, the collision of subjective intention with objective fate. After all, in the deepest sense, Oedipus is innocent; he is wronged by the gods, as he himself says in Oedipus at Colonus. Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life. Once upon a time a Against Interpretation: And Other Essays when high art was scarceit must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or worse yet Art into Culture. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.