I read Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on 'Camp' " a couple years ago (when studying with Peter) and am returning to it with fresh eyes as I prepare to analyze the Oz show. A few months ago someone asked me to define 'Camp' and I muddled through some description that wasn't nearly as concise as Sontag's initial assessment ("the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration"). She definitely elaborates on this point, but it remains a solid foundation for additional clarification.
One of the most wonderful thing about reading her essays from 1962-1965 (as published in Against Interpretation), is reading them with awareness that she herself acknowledges that she moved on from those thoughts. She insists that she meant them when she wrote them, but that she didn't believe them before she wrote them and was already moving onto further thoughts once she finished writing. I realize this may appear to be an obvious point, but I feel it encourages the reader to not limit a perception of her writing to one piece that was written at one point in her evolution as a person, as an artist, and as a writer.
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