David Annand
The Ecstatic Truth
In her seminal essay ‘Against Interpretation’, Susan Sontag famously argued that ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’. It was a mistake, she claimed, to attempt to reduce a work to a single, stable reading, as we have with, say, Animal Farm, the characters of which are generally taken to represent the major players in the early Soviet Union. Such a framing prevents people from experiencing a piece of art for themselves, leading them too narrowly towards the intellectual ‘content’ of the work and away from its sensuousness, its magic.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate