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.

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