SOURCE: “Ionesco” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 115-23.
In the following essay, Sontag notes that Ionesco’s early work, in which he discovers and uses theatrically the poetry of clichés and language-as-thing, is interesting and original. However, she finds his later work infused with a crude, simplistic negativity that is extracted from his earlier artistic discovery, and considers his attitudes a “type of misanthropy covered over with fashionable clichés of cultural diagnosis.”
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