With the publication of “Notes on Camp” in 1964 Susan Sontag became for a while the most talked about critic in America. She had been publishing essays since 1961 in which she was making a reputation for herself as the critic furtherest “in” or “way out,” depending on one's linguistic preferences. She has always been responsive to the new, as much an exponent as a critic of the avant-garde, a term she uses with a certain reluctance, because she is intelligent enough to know that the avant-garde has its problems now. She has created the impression – without posturing or immodesty – of being dead center, of knowing where the action is. Her essays have the considerable virtues of seriousness, forcefulness and clarity of exposition, genuine intelligence and often humility. They are virtues rarely, if at all, found together in exponents or critics of the avant-garde. She writes a vigorous, reasoned and thoughtful criticism that makes her manner seem almost traditional. And this is very much to her advantage, because even those readers who are hostile to her views are disarmed by her lucid and informing way of speaking of the strange world of post-modern art.

But the attractiveness of her essays has diverted her readers from a serious consideration of what she is in fact saying. Most discussions of her work focus on her as performer rather than critic. Her critical doctrine of style in great part provokes this view of her.