A new sensibility announces itself, one that refuses to subordinate art to meaning and insists on the primacy of form, surface, and sensation. Susan Sontag's 1966 essay collection arrived like a manifesto for a culture ready to abandon the hermeneutics of depth. The title essay argues that interpretation impoverishes the artwork by translating it into something else. Other essays range across Camus, science fiction, and the aesthetics of silence, each one lucid, combative, and exhilaratingly sure of itself. Sontag was thirty-three, and she wrote as though clearing a room. The collection made her the foremost intellectual of her generation and posed a question criticism still cannot answer: what if the work means exactly what it is?