ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the background and genesis of Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” focusing its analysis on her rejection of Freudian hermeneutics. By situating the essays in her initial collection of essays, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, in chronological order (which is obscured by the order the volume presents), we are able to offer an intellectual history of Sontag’s early interest in Freud and his ideas, and her involvement with one of his great mid-twentieth-century articulators Philip Rieff, and her growing disillusionment with and final rejection of this manner of looking at art and aesthetics. Of specific importance in this study of the background of “Against Interpretation” is Sontag’s engagement (from the perspectives of aesthetics and religious studies) with the early work of Norman O. Brown. The chapter ends with an examination of “Against Interpretation” as a culmination of Sontag’s work on Freud and her turning away from academic theory.
