Discussed in this essay:

Against Interpretation: And Other Essays, by Susan Sontag. Picador. 336 pages. $15.

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, edited by David Rieff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $25.

I picked up Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963 hoping for a peek into the origins of her first book of essays, Against Interpretation. In 1966 this collection was the first serious, nonacademic book that encompassed the constellation of my own generation’s passionate enthusiasms. Sontag was “against interpretation.” She was for “an erotics of art.” She wrote about Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albert Camus, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all…