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October 5, 2024
from “On style”
in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
by Susan Sontag
“Art is not only about something; it is something.”—Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation, published in 1966, was Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays and is considered a modern classic. It includes the groundbreaking essays “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “Against interpretation,” “Happenings,” and “On style” in her battle against philistinism in art criticism.
The Paragraph of the Week is from “On Style” in which she famously argues that a work of art is not a statement, but an experience.
The Paragraph of the Week
At least since Diderot, the main tradition of criticism in all the arts, appealing to such apparently dissimilar criteria as verisimilitude and moral correctness, in effect treats the work of art as a statement being made in the form of a work of art ... To treat works of art in this fashion is not wholly irrelevant. But it is, obviously, putting art to use—for such purposes as inquiring into the history of ideas, diagnosing contemporary culture, or creating social solidarity. Such a treatment has little to do with what actually happens when a person possessing some training and aesthetic sensibility looks at a work of art appro-priately. A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
—Susan Sontag
Commentary
So what is my practice here at The Humble Essayist? I find essays to be thematically rich compared to poetry and fiction, not to mention the paintings, movies, happenings, and campy displays that fascinate Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, a cultural touchstone of the sixties where “On Style” appeared. Essays let ideas—what she calls content—lurk just under the surface, embedded metaphorically, implied stylistically, or stated elegantly. My job is not to interpret them, but to ferret them out. I love style and spend as much space as possible describing it, and in Sontag’s case the crisp, learned, and astute texture of her prose explains much of its charm and power. As she wrote, looking back on her essays thirty years later, “my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me.” But I don’t have much space and need to get to the point: for Sontag, style is substance—no need to dwell on the latter.
—THE
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Announcements
News from Great River Review
Three lyric essays by Steven Harvey appear in the newest edition of Great River Review. The first piece, called “Oakleaf Hydrangea” begins this way:
"The oakleaf hydrangea winking at me over the top of my book carves a saucy shape in the mind standing boldly as itself between me and the rest of the world, hands on hips as it were, the woody bush a swirl like the vessel of water it is named for..."
Learn more here.
Listen to the Dan Hill Podcast on The Beloved Republic
at The New Books Network
Dan Hill interviews author Steven Harvey about politics, family, race, and being The Humble Essayist on his radio program at the New Books Network.
Here.
Return to main feature here.
News from The Humble Essayist Press
Beware poets writing prose? Nah. Check out the new releases from The Humble Essayist Press! Essay collections by two award-winning poets. Learn more here.
The Beloved Republic Review
Thanks to Tarn Wilson for her review of The Beloved Republic at the River Teeth website. She writes: “In his titular essay 'The Beloved Republic,' Harvey makes this heartening promise to those who feel worried and wearied, helpless in the face of 'war and tyranny,' that by devoting ourselves to lives of steady kindness, creativity, and friendship we are joining an invisible, benevolent army.” Read the full review here.
Brevity
Thanks to Brevity magazine for publishing the short prose piece “The Hermit Thrush.”
You can read the entire piece at Brevity here.
Hunger Mountain
Thanks to Hunger Mountain for publishing “Aubade,” my exploration of perception in lyric prose. It begins with this epigraph from the artist Paul Cézanne: “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”
You can read the entire brief piece here.
Zone 3 Interview on The Beloved Republic
Thanks to Amy Wright and the folks at Zone 3 for granting me an interview about my new book. Amy reads with discernment, asks great and surprising questions, and listens carefully to the answers. Check out the question she opens with in the sidebar--it goes right to the heart of the matter! See the full interview here.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
Trailer One
Trailer Two
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The Beloved Republic
I am pleased to announce that my fourth collection of personal essays won the Wandering Aengus Press nonfiction award and has been nominated for two Pushcarts. Thanks to the Press for this honor.
What is the Beloved Republic? E. M. Forster, who coined the phrase, called it “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who “have the power to endure” and “can take a joke.” Pitted against authoritarianism, the Beloved Republic is the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies. Taking Forster’s phrase for its title, my book can be read as dispatches from that besieged land.
Available online and at bookstores. Learn more at the author's website
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Folly Beach
Folly Beach is a book-length personal essay about easing fears of mortality and loss through creativity. It never loses sight of the inevitable losses that life brings, but doesn't let loss have the last word. In the face of the grim, Folly Beach holds up the human capacity to create as our sufficient joy.
—THE
“In a world of loss, creativity is the best revenge.”
You can learn more about the recent work of Steven Harvey at his author's page here.
THE Mission
We at The Humble Essayist are in love with the paragraph, that lowliest of literary techniques. A sentence stands out as a noble thing: a complete thought. But what is a paragraph? And what, in particular, is a good one? You know it when you read it--that is our article of faith. So on Friday of each week, beginning on Independence Day 2014, the very day 169 years earlier that Henry Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, we will select a single paragraph from an essay or a reflective memoir and print it here along with a paragraph of commentary. We will choose paragraphs that are surprising, beautifully written, and, above all, thematic--illuminating the author's comment on life. Each paragraph of the week is, in short, a concise review of the writer's work. We hope that this page will introduce you to many exciting authors and their ideas.
The Humble Essayist thanks Clipartpal for the public domain artwork of "The Old Man Reading" that is the logo for the site.
