ABSTRACT
In her famous 1966 essay, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag asserts, “What the overemphasis on content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. 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” (Sontag 1966 [1964]: 5). However, Sontag immediately grants that it is not just any concept of “interpretation” that she views as pernicious. The conception to which she objects is one in which the interpreter selects a set of elements from the targeted work and constructs an interpretation by claiming of each element that it really means such and such or stands for so and so. As she says herself, interpretation, so conceived, is virtually a task of translation – translating a part or aspect of the work into some proprietary content it purportedly expresses. However, Sontag's brief against interpretation is confusing. Most of the leading practitioners of close interpretation in the early sixties, the New Critics for instance, had themselves rejected the idea that interpretation consisted in the systematic translation or allegorization of the work to be interpreted. Interpretation grounded on the “translation idea” commits “the heresy of paraphrase,” in Cleanth Brooks’ well-known phrase (Brooks 1947). From the point of view of these critics, Sontag is really not objecting to the proper enterprise of interpreting works of art, but to an insidious misconception of what practical criticism amounts to. For these critics, the “project of interpretation” is a tenable one, and it is important. What need to be repudiated are simply confusions about the proper aims and methodology of the project.
