Challenging what she saw as “established distinctions within the world of culture itself-that between form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and. In her work, she rejected the traditional project of art interpretation as reactionary and stifling and called instead for a new, more sensual experience of the aesthetic world: “an act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness” ( Against Interpretation, 29). She became for many a cultural symbol, the image of the female intellectual she herself would joke that she was best known for the white streak in her dark hair, rather than for anything she had written. Advocating a “new sensibility” that was “defiantly pluralistic,” as she announced in her groundbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag became simultaneously an intellectual of consequence and a popular icon, publishing everywhere from Partisan Review to Playboy and appearing on the covers of Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. When her essays first began appearing on the American critical scene in the early 1960s, Susan Sontag was heralded by many as the voice-and the face-of the Zeitgeist.
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