The death of Susan Sontag, in 2004, served to point out just how much things had changed in the critical world since the annus mirabilis of 1964, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl and Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" appeared. She spray-painted on the walls of the academy the incendiary line, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Railing against imposing theories of interpretation on the "sensuous surface" of art, she rejected the New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and other attempts to inflict meaning on art. Pleasure was her principle. Forty years on, what we have 24/7 in most English departments is the complete and total ascendancy of hermeneutics. Instead of the erotics of art, we've got the neurotics of art: the meaning-mongering of interpretation for its own sake.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:05 PM  |