ABSTRACT
In her 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag sounded the keynote of a neoformalism, a new wave of French criticism that was about to sweep over modern language departments, wreaking havoc with the traditional interpretative positions standing in its path, all hermeneutics anchored in significant details. Let me recall very briefly the main points of Sontag's essay, for they retain even today their polemical freshness. What must first be noted is Sontag's definition of interpretation, for her assault on hermeneutics is grounded in this definition: “The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?” 1 Having thus reduced interpretation to only one of its meanings, Sontag then proceeds to charge it with reductionism (ironically, the very accusation most frequently leveled at the structuralists and their algebraic equations and algorithms): “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’” (17).
