Susan Sontag
Photo: Lynn Gilbert · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Essayist and novelist whose 'Against Interpretation' (1964) handed criticism a dare it still hasn't fully taken: stop melting art down to its themes and describe what is actually there — 'in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' Her film writing, from Bresson to science fiction ('The Imagination of Disaster'), treats style as substance and remains the sharpest antidote to message-hunting.