Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

MODERN discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised. The subject of literature has pre-empted much of the energy that formerly went into philosophy, until that subject was purged by the empiricists and logicians. The modern dilemmas of feeling, action, and belief are argued out on the field of literary masterpieces. Art is seen as a mirror of human capacities in a given historical period, as the preeminent form by which a culture defines itself, names itself, dramatizes itself. In particular, questions about the death of literary forms—is the long narrative poem still possible, or is it dead? the novel? verse drama? tragedy?—are of the greatest moment. The burial of a literary form is a moral act, a high achievement of the modern morality of honesty. For, as an act of self-definition, it is also a self-entombment.