Against Interpretation and Other Essays Audiobook By Susan Sontag cover art

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

By: Susan Sontag
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $17.16

Buy for $17.16

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic.

Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world.

It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as, her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

©2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Essays Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Popular Culture Social Sciences
All stars
Most relevant  
Each essay from Sontag builds on the last through harmonies, counterpoints, and ellipses into a melody of exposition. The goal?

Unify the logos, ethos, and pathos of art as a reflection of the human experience, so as to advocate for a modern theory of aesthetic appreciation. The conclusions Sontag draws inform everything from how artists should approach outlines of works not-yet-started to the value governments and corporations place on ouevres.

The voice talent / reading itself leaves a little to be desired but it's still overall good.

Synesthesia at Its Most Structured

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
If you, like me, fell in love with Sontag’s work because of On Photography, do not go back and listen to these essays.
I felt like I was at a literary conference. And since she admits she even doesn’t agree with everything she wrote, and these essays are now 60 years old, the only way you should encounter this book is in text form if you are in a literary criticism class writing a paper summarizing criticism of criticism.
Also… the manner in which these essays are read does not emphasize the form: essay. It’s almost jarring to hear the narrator pronounce French authors or Italian authors as if she has no accent at all.
We all know Sontag is revered, and deservedly so, but as someone now retired, revisiting old haunts or selections I might have missed over the years, I was dissatisfied.

The manner in which these essays are read does not truly emphasize the form: essays.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sontag's ideas are way more spirituous than this interpretation by Tavia Gilbert. Not only that, but an additional detail: this narrator doesn't pronounce french properly and, since Sontag cites lots of french authors and ouvres, this fact takes me away from the listening every time the opportunity rises.

Against interpretation, like, literally.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I just don't get this narrator. It's almost like she's trying to channel Susan Sontag but Sontag spoke in an assured, even tone.....This Tavia Gilbert makes her sound somehow snobbish and unsure of herself. She really clings to the sound ending a sentence....maybe this is for enunciation but comes across labored, irritating and untrue to Sontag's speaking style.

I've listened to Jennifer Van Dyck's reading on Sontag's journals and "On Photography". Audible PLEASE HAVE THESE RE-RECORDED with Jennifer Van Dyck.

Excellent Essays Hurt By Labored Narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sontag is smart and her writing will get your gears turning. The French was difficult to understand which was annoying

Distracting Reader serious writing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
She wrote from a place of looking at a world where things were just starting to open up in certain ways, and her perspective a lot of the time seems to be “wait, is this really as open as you think it is? Is it really possible to live without those traditional restrictions, or were our ancestors right that those restrictions are hard-baked into the fabric of the universe?”

In a time some 50-60 years later where more things have opened up, but people — intellectually limited people who have never lived outside of America and Europe, never lived outside of the dominance of the tyranny of YHWH-worshippers — are still asking the same questions, doubting whether or not openness is really possible, these essays seem restrictive.

On the other hand, no one asks deep questions at all anymore. They just live their lives with a fake façade of openness when deep down, they’re terrified of anything outside of the cultural boundaries they’ve been taught.

Worthwhile as a historical document?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.