Notes on Camp
Susan Sontag
Sontag published this in Partisan Review in 1964, her first contribution to that magazine. She treats camp as a sensibility rather than an idea, something that can be described in notes but not argued into a thesis. The link goes to Against Interpretation and Other Essays, the 1966 Farrar, Straus and Giroux collection that carries it, so the volume is larger than the catalogued piece.
Why you should read this
Sontag's essay defines camp sensibility through fifty-eight numbered notes rather than a single sustained argument, treating it as a way of seeing built on artifice, exaggeration and a fondness for the failed and extravagant over the merely good. Best for readers who want the founding critical vocabulary for camp as a term of art.
- Field
- Art History
- Form
- Non-fiction
- Published
- 1964
- Themes
- AestheticsArt History
