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Against Interpretation and Other Essays

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Against Interpretation and Other Essays

By: Susan Sontag
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
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About this listen

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 History Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Social Sciences Nonfiction
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There were some strange and inexplicable mis-readings in this narration. These errors have made it harder to follow a book of what are already complex arguments. For example, in the essay on the films of Bresson, Sontag quotes him as saying that in film "the author takes fragments of reality and arranges them in such a way that their juxtaposition transforms them." But the narrator reads it as "their juxtaposition fails them," which has quite a different meaning!

Another problem with the narration is the pronunciation of foreign words and names. For the book of a critic so interested in French art, it would have been good to get a narrator confident with her French. But this narrator struggles. As just one example, she pronounces "Jeanne" as "Jean", which is a bit confusing in essays that feature both a Jeanne and a Jean. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I found these mispronunciations distracting.

Disappointing narration

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Although Sontag's writing is clear and easy to follow, the narrator will have you on the edge of aneurysm by the 50th 'Sartre'. You come to anticipate it like a hiccup or a pothole on a bad road, and it saps focus. I skipped entire chapters. In fact I took a whole week off just on account of the French names. I worry the damage might be permanent

Good essays, sometimes painful narration

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