This is Not Your World: An Essay in Two Parts
I. I’ve been reading a lot of critic Susan Sontag’s early essays of late. I’ve been motivated by a desire to have my own approach to criticism influenced more by that of other critics, and I’ve been influenced heavily in the way Sontag takes a work of art at face value. Explicit in her essays from the late ’60s, “Against Interpretation” and “On Style,” and implicit in the rest of her writing, is this refusal to separate an artwork’s “form” from its “content.” That is, she refuses to separate an artwork into what it “is” (a canvas, brushstrokes, colors, frame),
