Camille Paglia

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Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia
Born	April 2, 1947 (1947-04-02) (age 61) Endicott, New York
Occupation	Professor and Cultural critic
Nationality	United States
Writing period	1974 -
Subjects	Feminism, Popular Culture, Art, Poetry, Sex
Influences Bloom, Harrison, Freud, Frazer, de Beauvoir, McLuhan, Knight, de Sade, Wilde
Official website http://www.breakblowburn.com

Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York) is an American social critic, author and teacher. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson , published in 1990, became a bestseller. Since 1984 she has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."^{[citation needed]}

Contents 1 Overview 2 Biography 2.1 College years 2.1.1 Binghamton University, Harpur College (1964–1968) 2.1.2 Yale Graduate School (1968–1972) 2.2 Teaching career 3 Works 3.1 Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art (1974) 3.2 Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) 3.3 Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) 3.4 Vamps and Tramps (1994) 3.5 The Birds (1998) 3.6 Basic Instinct commentary track (2001) 3.7 Break, Blow, Burn (2005) 4 Criticism of Paglia 5 Bibliography 6 News articles 6.1 Articles by Paglia 6.2 Interviews 6.3 Articles about Paglia 7 Notes and references 8 External links 8.1 Discussion groups

[edit] Overview

Paglia^[1] is an intellectual of many seeming contradictions: she is an atheist who respects religion^[2] and a classicist who champions art both high and low, with a view that human nature has an inherently dangerous Dionysian aspect, especially the wilder, darker sides of human sexuality.^[3]

She came to public attention in 1990, with the publication of her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Her notoriety as the author of this book made it possible for her to write on popular culture and feminism in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Paglia challenged what she saw as the "liberal establishment" of the day including figures such as Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, prominent academics and advocacy groups such as National Organization for Women (NOW) and ACT UP.

Paglia describes herself as a feminist and as a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton and Ralph Nader, and even campaigned for John F. Kennedy as an adolescent. Her rejection of the idea that homosexuality is an inborn trait, however, indicates her willingness to break with liberal orthodoxies.^[4] Her views on the legalization of recreational drugs and prostitution, and on the relaxation of sexual consent laws, are more libertarian. She is a strong critic of much of the feminism that began with Betty Friedan's 1962 The Feminine Mystique and compared feminists, whom she considered to be victim-centered, to the Unification Church. At the same time Paglia's embrace of fetishism, pornography, prostitution and male homosexuality puts her at odds with the "family values" of American social conservatives.^[5]

She is critical of the influence certain French philosophers and theorists (including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault) have had on the humanities in the U.S. and favors a curriculum grounded in comparative religion, art history and the literary canon, with a greater emphasis on facts in the teaching of history. Paglia has condemned Foucault because she believes that he deliberately spread HIV.^[6] However, Paglia's assessment of French theorists is not purely negative, since she has made positive comments about some of the work of Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze. ^[7]

Her supporters (for different reasons) include Andrew Sullivan, Christina Hoff Sommers, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Matt Drudge and her Yale mentor Harold Bloom. Elise Sutton, a dominatrix advocating female domination of males, describes Paglia as a female supremacist and a friend.^[8]

In September 2005, she was ranked number 20 in a list of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" compiled by the editors of the American journal Foreign Policy and the UK journal The Prospect. ^[9]

Paglia wrote a column for Salon.com from its inception in 1995 until 2001 and rejoined Salon in February 2007. She is a contributing editor at Interview magazine and is on the editorial board of the classics and humanities journal Arion. At present, she is writing her third collection of essays, to be published by Vintage Books, and a companion piece to Break, Blow, Burn dealing with the visual arts rather than poetry.

[edit] Biography

Paglia (pronounced PAH-lia) is the elder daughter of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (Colapietro) Paglia. Her mother was born in Ceccano, Italy. Her father's ancestors came from Italy.

Despite their modest means, her parents exposed her to classical Western art and culture. The first music to make an impression on her was Bizet's Carmen, an opera which, in her words, "struck me with electrifying force."^[10] She was three when she first heard the opera, but was still enamored of it in her writing more than 40 years later.

Paglia spent her primary school years in rural Oxford, New York, where her family lived in a working farmhouse.^[11] Her father, a veteran of World War Two,^[12] taught at the Oxford Academy high school. In 1957, her family moved to Syracuse, New York, so that her father could begin graduate school; he eventually became a Professor of Romance Languages at Le Moyne College. She attended the Edward Smith Elementary school, T. Aaron Levy Junior High and William Nottingham High School.^[13]

By all accounts, she was an excellent student at Nottingham High School. She spent her Saturdays in the Carnegie Library, absorbed in books and manuscripts. In 1992 Carmelia Metosh, her Latin teacher for three years said "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now. She was very alert, 'with it' in every way."^[14] Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgements to Sexual Personae, later describing her as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards."^[13]

She attended Spruce Ridge Camp, a Girl Scout facility in the Adirondacks where, by her later account, she had crushes on the woman counselors. She took a variety of names when she was there, including Anastasia (her confirmation name, inspired by the Ingrid Bergman film), Stacy, and Stanley. An iconic experience was the time the outhouse exploded when she poured too much lime into it. "It symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology...and I would drop the bomb into it."^[15][16]

In 1963, Paglia discovered feminist scholarship, through Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.^[17] The book had a tremendous influence on her and furthered her resolve to become a feminist writer. On July 8 of that year, Newsweek magazine published her letter about equal opportunity for American women. On November 24 of that year, Syracuse's Herald American profiled her outstanding achievements as a student, noting her longtime study of feminist icon Amelia Earhart.

Reading The Second Sex led Paglia to stop working on the book about Earhart she had been writing for three years, and to resolve to write a "mega-book that will take everything in"; thus began Sexual Personae.^[18]

[edit] College years

[edit] Binghamton University, Harpur College (1964–1968)

She entered Binghamton University, then called Harpur College, in 1964, graduating as class valedictorian in 1968. The essays she wrote during those years on "sexual ambiguity and aggression in literature, art and history" grew into Sexual Personae.

She had been writing poetry prior to entering college (her poem "Atrophy," had been published in her local newspaper in 1964 ^[19]), but it was at Harpur that she received an education in it, taking courses in Metaphysical poetry and John Milton. She later wrote that the biggest impact on her thinking were the classes taught by poet Milton Kessler. "He believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature... And oh did I believe in that. Probably from my Italian background — that's the way we respond to things, with our body. From Michelangelo, Bernini, there's this whole florid physicality leading right down to the Grand Opera, the great arias."^[20]

She wrote her senior thesis on Emily Dickinson, and aspired to be a poet, inspired by the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She submitted a reconfiguration of the Dido episode of Virgil's Aeneid to the college literary magazine, but its editor, Deborah Tannen, rejected it, saying that "Poets don't write like this anymore."^[21]

At Harpur she befriended three gay men who have had a lifelong influence on her thinking: Bruce Benderson (a classmate at Nottingham High School), Stephen Jarratt, and Stephen Feld. Her father got her a summer job working the night shift at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse as an emergency ward secretary. "It was unbelievable, like being in a war without any danger to myself," she later said. "I forced myself to look at every single horrible thing — once, OK? After a while, you start to adjust. It was pivotal because it's one of the reasons I'm not sentimental at all about death or disease."^[22]

At Harpur, she did not fit the typical gender roles. Seeing a defenseless female student being groped on the street by two drunken men, she hit one of them in the teeth; she was 19 at the time. She was once put on probation for committing 39 pranks, a fact in which she takes pride.^[23] She told an interviewer in 2003 that she follows the model of the "Hindu gurus, the aging masters and sages" because they're "actually very funny. They're funny, they're prankish. Zen masters are known to be prankish." She said, "To me, comedy is a symptom of a balanced perspective on life, and people who are going around, like gloomy gusses, in that Sontag style of intellectual, these people are suffering from something coming from their childhood, it has nothing to do with the proper intellectual response to life..."^[24]

[edit] Yale Graduate School (1968–1972)

Paglia did her graduate studies at Yale just as the women's movement and gay liberation exploded into American consciousness, yet here too her sexual orientation and sexually ambiguous persona led to conflict. A friend of hers at the time, Robert Caserio, recalled in 1996:

She did not act in a way that convention there dictated. Yale was an extremely genteel place. Camille wasn't genteel. She was so upfront and she wore pants in a very aggressive way. She was an out-feminist and identified with gay sexuality. We were all very much more discreet.

– Robert Caserio

A few months after beginning her studies, she attended a party in the home of R. W. B. Lewis, one of her teachers, and ended up being insulted by Robert Jay Lifton and his wife for being a lesbian. Lifton was, at the time, the Foundations' Fund research professor in psychiatry at Yale, a position he held until 1984. This verbal attack seems to have emboldened her not only to be out as a lesbian, but also to be in everyone's face about it. She has repeatedly noted she was openly lesbian while at Yale Graduate School, even claiming to have been the only open lesbian there from 1968 to 1972.^[25]

While at Yale, Paglia quarreled with Rita Mae Brown, whom she later characterised as "then darkly nihilist", and argued with the New Haven, Connecticut Women's Liberation Rock Band when they dismissed the Rolling Stones as "sexist".^[26] She also "had two close encounters with Kate Millett (author of Sexual Politics) just after she became famous, in New Haven, Connecticut, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but she was too morosely self-absorbed to notice." Because of what she saw as Millett's "careless" attitude toward scholarship, Paglia became critical of her and those who supported her work.

Her study of sexuality in Western literature continued to develop with her reading of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590). In 1970, she wrote a 160-page paper for her last graduate seminar at Yale entitled "Male and Female in Virginia Woolf." Her original plan for her book "Sexual Personae" was that it would end with a study of Woolf and Lawrence.^[27]

In 1971, she discovered Kenneth Clark's The Nude (1956) , a book which would have a profound impact on her dissertation and later work. "If ever I was in love with a book, it was with this one," she wrote in Sex, Art & American Culture; and in an article for Women's Quarterly in 2002, she called it "the best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art."^[28]

In 1971 she received a master's degree in philosophy from Yale and began a Ph.D dissertation under the supervision of her mentor Harold Bloom. The dissertation was then titled "The Androgynous Dream: the image of the androgyne as it appears in literature and is embodied in the psyche of the artist, with reference to the visual arts and the cinema."^[29] While reading a draft of her thesis in 1971, Bloom wrote in the margin that a passage was "Mere Sontagisme!" Paglia later wrote, "It saddened me, but I knew Bloom was right. Susan Sontag, who could have been Jane Harrison's successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing."^[30]

In a letter dated February 13, 1972 to Carolyn Heilbrun at Columbia University, Paglia inquired about her forthcoming book on androgyny;^[31] Heilbrun wrote back saying that her book could not deal with all available material on the subject. When asked about Paglia's letter years later, Heilbrun could not remember it.^[32] When Heilbrun's "Toward a Recognition of Androgyny" came out, Paglia panned it in a review for the Summer 1973 issue of the Yale Review. "Heilbrun's book is so poorly researched that it may disgrace the subject in the eyes of serious scholars," she wrote. She noted that "the most distinguished commentators on androgyny are Mircea Eliade and G. Wilson Knight"; and criticized Heilbrun for her reliance on the work of Joseph Campbell, and for including "four flattering references" to Kate Millett while making "fifteen glib jibes" at Sigmund Freud. The author of the review was clearly an expert on the history of androgyny, but as it was the journal's policy for reviews to be published without attribution, few knew that Paglia wrote it.

[edit] Teaching career

In the fall 1972, Paglia began teaching at Bennington College, which hired her in part thanks to a recommendation from Harold Bloom.^[33] At Bennington, she befriended the philosopher James Fessenden, who first taught there that very semester.^[34] One of her students, Mitchell Lichtenstein became a prominent filmmaker, writing and directing "Teeth" in 2007, a movie that was inspired by the myth of the vagina dentata, and was heavily influenced by Paglia's work. Another student of hers was Mark W. Edmundson, now a professor at the University of Virginia, who in January 1997, wrote about her as follows:

She was appointed as my faculty advisor in her first term. I went in for my advisorial visit and she was entirely herself, talking very fast about many things I knew nothing about. I ran in fear. Alas, I was too puzzled to take any of her classes, which seemed to be full of very sophisticated people from LA and from New York.^[35]

– Professor Mark W. Edmundson

Writer Heidi Schmidt, who attended her classes, recalled in 1996:

"She was thought of as peculiar. She was so full of excitement and so intense. She would light one cigarette and then forget about it and light another, so she was waving two cigarettes. I think people took her quite lightly, she was thought of as eccentric."

– Author Heidi Schmidt, former student of Paglia

Yet another Bennington student from Paglia's time there was Judith Butler, who went on to a successful academic career. In a 2005 interview, Paglia said of Butler:

She was a student when I was at my first job at Bennington in the 70s, and I saw her up close. And I know what she knows. I mean, she transferred from there, to Yale, and her background in anything is absolutely minimal. She started a career in philosophy, abandoned that, and has been taken as this sort of major philosophical thinker by people in literary criticism. But has she ever made any exploration of science? For her to be dismissing biology, and to say gender is totally socially constructed — where are her readings, her studies? It's all gameplay, wordplay, and her work is utterly pernicious, a total dead-end."^[36]

– Paglia, on poststructuralist feminist Judith Butler

Paglia's first scholarly publication was "Lord Hervey and Pope," published in the 1973 18th Century Studies. (A Times Literary Supplement cover story on Lord Hervey, November 2, praised the paper as "brilliant.").^[37] The article was a revision of a term paper she wrote. In April 1973, she attended a Susan Sontag lecture at Dartmouth College and later invited her to Bennington to speak there on October 4. The event proved controversial because Sontag read a short story instead of giving the expected cultural lecture. Paglia later commented, "I was stunned because I thought she was going to be a major intellectual", later writing at length about their meeting in an essay entitled "Sontag, Bloody Sontag", published in Vamps & Tramps.

Another intellectual disappointment for Paglia was Marija Gimbutas, who published The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe in 1974. At the same time, Paglia launched "a detailed attack on an exhibit at Bennington's Crossett Library, 'Matriarchy: The Golden Age,' which used appallingly shoddy feminist materials alleging the existence of a peaceful, prehistoric matriarchy, later supposedly overthrown by nasty males."^[38]

Through her study of the classics and the scholarly work of Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, Erich Neumann and others, Paglia developed a theory of sexual history that contradicted a number of ideas in vogue at the time, hence her criticism of Gimbutas, Heilbrun, Millet and others. She laid out her ideas on matriarchy, androgyny, homosexuality, sadomasochism and other topics in her Yale Ph.D. thesis Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, which she defended in December 1974. In September 1976, she gave a public lecture drawing on that dissertation,^[39] in which she discussed Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, followed by remarks on Diana Ross, Gracie Allen, Yul Brynner, and Stephane Audran.^[40]

In March 1975, she saw Germaine Greer speak in Albany. She was disappointed, reporting later that "During the question period, I nervously raised my hand from the crowd and asked if Greer, a former English professor, would be writing on literary subjects again soon. Her reply was stern and swift: 'There are far more important things in the world than literature!'"

In another disheartening experience, Paglia "nearly came to blows with the founding members of the women's studies program at the State University of New York at Albany, when they categorically denied that hormones influence human experience or behavior. These women (whose field was literature) attributed my respect for science to 'brainwashing' by men."^[41] Similar fights with feminists, lesbians, chauvinists, homophobes and academics culminated in a 1978 incident that led her to resign from Bennington a year later.^[42]

Paglia finished Sexual Personae in the early 1980s, but could not get it published. She supported herself with visiting and part-time teaching jobs at Yale, Wesleyan, and other Connecticut colleges. She taught night classes at the Sikorsky Helicopter plant. Her paper, "The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queen," was published in English Literary Renaissance, Winter 1979, and her dissertation was cited by J. Hillis Miller in his April 1980 article "Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation," in Journal of Religion in Literature, but her academic career was otherwise stalled at a time when her peers were moving on to important positions at major universities. In a 1995 letter to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a New Haven alternative newspaper (The Advocate) in the early 1980s."^[43] She wrote articles on New Haven's historic pizzerias and on an old house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad."^[44]

In 1984, she joined the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art to become the University of the Arts. While travelling in Europe, she wrote about German women as follows: "The women, stern-faced, melt the submissive heart...All look like Lotte Lenya!"^[45]

For some years, Paglia has shared a residence with the artist and teacher Allison Maddex. Paglia legally adopted the son Maddex bore in 2002.

[edit] Works

[edit] Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art (1974)

Sexual Personae is the dissertation she presented to the Graduate School of Yale University in candidacy for her Ph.D in December 1974, and which formed the basis for her 1990 book by the same name. The 451 page study, organized into four chapters, examined the appearance of sexually ambiguous figures in art and literature from classical antiquity to the modern period. She wrote that her thesis was based on the assumption that "the inner dynamic of all artistic creation is a psychic union between masculine and feminine powers." She described her method as interdisciplinary, as it combined "literary criticism, art history, and psychology in what I believe is a new synthesis."^[46]

[edit] Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The two-volume manuscript of Sexual Personae was completed in February 1981 and rejected by seven publishers and five agents throughout the 1980s before its eventual acceptance by Ellen Graham for Yale University Press in 1985.^[47] For the next few years,^[48] she continued to teach while perfecting volume one of the book for its eventual publication in February 1990, and releasing a few additional portions of it in other journals and books.

Her paper "Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene" was published in 1988 in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, edited by Bloom; '"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art", was published in 1988 in Western Humanities Review; and "Sex," was published in the Spenser Encyclopedia by A. C. Hamilton in 1989.

After the release of Sexual Personae on February 15, 1990^[49] the book received little publicity from its publisher as was typical of university presses at the time, but it sold well for months, prompting Yale University Press to send it for a second printing by November 1990. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award that year, and then reprinted in paperback by Vintage Press in 1991. It became a best-seller, as did her subsequent books Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992) and Vamps and Tramps (1994).

In Sexual Personae, and in subsequent media statements and campus appearances throughout the early 1990s, Paglia aroused controversy by criticizing leaders of the American feminist movement, claiming they were ignorant of art, science and history, that they were hostile to men and were harming young women by teaching them to see themselves as nothing but victims. Her views on issues such as date rape, pornography, gay rights and educational reform mostly angered people on the political left, who accused her of such things as misogyny, homophobia and neoconservatism. A selection of her articles, lectures and other writings from this period appeared in her next book, Sex, Art, and American Culture.

Throughout the 1990s, she said that a second volume to Sexual Personae would be forthcoming, and was to include her thoughts on sports and popular culture.^[50] Eventually, she decided not to proceed with the book as planned, as it would need to undergo so many revisions in order to reflect her changing attitude towards popular culture.

[edit] Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992)

Whereas the 24 chapters of Sexual Personae looked at the study of decadence in art and culture from Egyptian history to the late 19th century, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), exposed readers to Paglia's views on contemporary figures such as Madonna ("the future of feminism"), Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Mapplethorpe and Anita Hill.

Two chapters of the book were devoted to date rape, which the author said contemporary feminists had been incapable of preventing. "Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in civilized society", she wrote, "yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them."

Her controversial piece on Madonna, which was originally published in the New York Times in 1990,^[51] would be the first of several articles, reviews and other commentary about her for years to come. When Madonna was asked about her by a French interviewer in November 1992 she said "I’m flattered that she thinks of me as a feminist role model, and there are a lot of things that I agree with in her politics and stuff... that being a sexual being does not cancel out being a feminist. I agree with that. On the other hand, I think that sometimes she takes it all too seriously and I’m amused by some of the things that she says. But I’m really glad that she’s a fan of mine, and I think she’s an important person in culture." But when Esquire magazine (in 1994), Penthouse magazine, and the HBO cable network, tried to arrange for Paglia to interview her, Madonna refused. In 1998, she told Brazilian interviewer Marília Gabriela that "I think she was upset because I wouldn't do an interview with her... Unhappy people are nasty people."

[edit] Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Her next book was an essay collection titled Vamps and Tramps, a collection of her writings since her previous essay collection, and the mixed critical response generally concurred that too much was written on too wide a variety of topics. The book included a theoretical manifesto about sex, "No Law in the Arena", as well as transcripts of her previous TV and film appearances, including her 1993 collaboration with Glenn Belverio in his short film "Glennda and Camille Do Downtown," which played at the Sundance Film Festival and won first prize for best short documentary at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

The book was a bestseller and exposed a wide readership to her scathing views on contemporary matters such as feminism, academia, the Clinton presidency, the life of Jacqueline Kennedy, and the career of Barbra Streisand. Paglia explains her title thus:

I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment...Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic.

– Paglia

[edit] The Birds (1998)

In 1998 her fourth book to be published was an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds for the British Film Institute's "Film Classics Series".

[edit] Basic Instinct commentary track (2001)

In 2001, Paglia recorded a commentary track for the DVD of one of her favorite films, Basic Instinct. She speaks about the idea that society has destroyed the tension between the sexes, which Paglia says Basic Instinct captures perfectly. "Today, the ideal male is the gay man," she says, "and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men."

In analyzing what she calls "the strange sexual world of Basic Instinct" she notes that "Sharon Stone's performance as the vamp, Catherine Tramell, is in the mainline of femme fatale portrayals in old Hollywood from Theda Bara and Marlene Dietrich on." She praises almost everything about the film, even the credits and score, which she says are an "homage to Alfred Hitchcock, one of the master directors of the 20th century, and the one who first fused gory crime drama with scintillating, titillating, sexual intrigue and glamour." The lyrical music by Jerry Goldsmith "seems to record mystery, ambiguity, sexual pursuit of female by male, and then the stalking of male by female."

[edit] Break, Blow, Burn (2005)

In 2005 her study of poetry entitled Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems was published. The book contains full texts of the 43 poems, each followed by an essay. The title is from a line in "Holy Sonnet XIV" by John Donne. It was named as one of the "New York Times Notable Books of the Year" for 2005, and was on the bestseller lists for Amazon.com, Booksense, The New York Times, The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association and the Toronto Globe & Mail.

In this book, she wrote essays on poems by the following poets: William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, May Swenson, Gary Snyder, Norman H. Russell, Chuck Wachtel, Rochell Kraut, Wanda Coleman, Ralph Pomeroy, and Joni Mitchell

While speaking at events during the 2006 promotional tour for the paperback version of her book, she attacked the positive reputations that poets John Ashbery and Jorie Graham have enjoyed in academe. Of Graham she said, "Maybe she had some talent early on... She is like a mirror to the professors; they look into her and see themselves."^[52]

She also spoke of how she regretted not including poems by Allen Ginsberg in the book, since she has been a fan of his since reading "Howl". She said that she tried to excerpt the first hundred lines of "Howl", but that it gave the wrong impression of the work. The poem also did not entirely meet her standards. As she told a reporter for the Toronto Star: "'Howl', when I reread it, came across as so garish, stagey, hammy. It didn't work for this book."

[edit] Criticism of Paglia

The release of Sexual Personae drew strong criticism from some reviewers in the academic community, particularly in reaction to Paglia's critique of modern feminism. In her review, Professor Beth Loffreda wrote, "She garners most of her publicity by loudly and nastily proclaiming everyone wrong on the sensitive issues of gender, sexuality and rape." She concluded of Paglia, "Hers is a seductiveness of simple answers, of clear narratives, of motivations and actions traced solely to a biological origin—a place stripped of the complex ambiguities, the complex interactions of self, skin, group, and institutions that make up daily life."^[53]

Literary critic Mary Rose Kasraie echoed Lofreda's analysis, saying, "Paglia gives no indication she has read any studies related to women, or recent studies about imagination, nature and culture" and reiterates the "terrible gaps in her coverage." Kasraie criticizes her work as "distractingly antischolarly" and labels it "an unacademic wallow in Sadean sadomasochistic chthonian nature."^[54]

Prominent literary scholar Marianne Noble eviscerated Paglia for allegedly misreading sadomasochism in Emily Dickinson's poetry. Speaking more broadly, Noble wrote, "Paglia's absolute belief in biological determinism leads her to pronouncements about female nature that are not only detestable but dangerous, because they routinely receive serious widespread attention in the contemporary culture at large." "Paglia," she concludes, "derives appalling social conclusions."^[55]

Revered second-wave feminist Gloria Steinem compared Sexual Personae to Mein Kampf, and likened Paglia to Adolf Hitler.^[56] (In response, Paglia called Steinem "evil" and equated her with Joseph Stalin.^[57])

Betty Friedan, who launched the second-wave feminist movement with the publication of the Feminine Mystique, said of Paglia, "How can you take her seriously? She is an exhibitionist, and she takes the most extreme elements of the women's movement and tries to make the whole movement antisexual, antilife, antijoy. And neither I nor most of the women I know are that way.".^[58]

Renowned essayist and public intellectual Susan Sontag said of Paglia, "We used to think Norman Mailer was bad, but she makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen."^[59]

Third-wave feminist Naomi Wolf traded a series of barbed (and sometimes personal) attacks with Paglia throughout the early 1990s. In an article in The New Republic, Wolf labeled Paglia, "the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters." She went on to call Paglia's writing "full of howling intellectual dishonesty.".^[60]

When Paglia came onto the public scene in 1991, Molly Ivins wrote a scathing review of Sexual Personae in which she accused Paglia of historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations.^[61] Ivins concluded her polemic against Paglia with this much-reproduced passage:

“

There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "Poor dear, it's probably PMS." Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "What an asshole." Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.

”

John Updike wrote about Sexual Personae:

It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style — one short declarative sentence after another -- eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission.... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occurring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax.^[62]

Reviewing Sex, Art, & American Culture, Sue O'Sullivan called Paglia's writing "numbingly boring...repetitious, and tediously predictable." She proceeded to charge Paglia with being "chillingly naive about politics." O'Sullivan concludes, "Camille is vacuously reductive in her denunciations...her deep conservativism reveals itself more and more."^[63]

In a critical review of Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn, Kevin Clark describes the book as "a provocative host of cultural critiques masquerading as New Critical analysis."^[64] He goes on to call Paglia "inconsistent" and "showy", ending the review with:

“

Some critics may fashion themselves as superstars, but most of us rely on critical writing be just that - critical. If the logic breaks down in a poem that accounts for the discrepancy—see Whitman—we understand. When the breakdown occurs in an essay, we might feel it’s either a mistake—or just showy.

”

Katha Pollitt has described Paglia as "the Charles Murray of sex. You know, "There's nothing you can do about it."'^[65] Pollitt also accused Paglia of "glorify[ing] male dominance".^[66]

[edit] Bibliography

• Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art (Dissertation: 1974)
• Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
• Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992)
• Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (1994) ISBN 0-679-75120-3
• The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (1998)
• Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005) ISBN 0-375-42084-3

[edit] News articles

[edit] Articles by Paglia

• Articles, essays, etc, by Camille Paglia
• Salon Articles by Camille Paglia
• No fairy-tale ending for Madonna article by Paglia
• Hurricane Katrina has demolished this administration's mask of confidence article by Paglia
• Guardsmen's deaths strike at the heart of America article by Paglia
• 'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus Paglia's NYT review of Michael Schmidt's The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets.
• 'Zappa': Freak Out! Paglia's NYT review of Zappa by Barry Miles

[edit] Interviews

• Interviews with Camille Paglia
• Playboy interview, May 1995
• Oasis - Teen Talk with Camille Paglia, 1 June 1996
• Continuum Magazine - interview about AIDS with Huw Christie, July/August 1996
• Salon interview on the imminent Iraq war, February 2003
• Break, Blow, Burn - Camille Paglia discusses poetry, October 2005
• Salon interview, 27 October 2006
• Salon interview - Real inconvenient truths, 11 April 2007

[edit] Articles about Paglia

• Articles on Camille Paglia
• Racy radical; The fiesty, fast-talking Camille Paglia declares victory over the feminist establishment. Nothing is sacred to Camille Paglia. She's battled the left and the right. And now she's taking on academia.; [SOUTH SOUND Edition], JEN GRAVES. The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.: April 17, 2005. p. E.01
• Ten great female philosophers: THE THINKING WOMAN'S WOMEN; Radio 4's 'Greatest Philosopher' poll yielded an all-male Top 20. But is philosophy really a female-free zone? On the contrary, insists Camille Paglia and "here are 10 to prove the point";, [First Edition], The., July 14, 2005. p. 18.19
• Cover Story: Malcontent of Sexual Politics, Donahue, Deirdre. USA TODAY. McLean, Va.: May 12, 1992. p. D1
• AN AMAZON'S RUTHLESS, REVAMPED FEMINISM; [FINAL Edition] Jeff Simon - News Book Reviewer. Buffalo News. Buffalo, N.Y.: November 27, 1994. pg. G.7
• Our sometime sister, now our queen; Books, Nigella Lawson. The Times, London (UK): March 30, 1995. pg. 1
• Book review of The Birds by Jeffrey Crouse in The Journal of Film and Video, Volume 54, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall, 2002, pp. 101-102.

[edit] Notes and references

The references in this article would be clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking.

[edit] External links

• Paglia's Official Website.
• Camille Paglia resources by Marit Synnevåg
• Paglia Quotations.
• Paglia's page at Huffington Post.
• The Camille Paglia checklist

[edit] Discussion groups

• Googlegroups Paglia-L, the original Paglia discussion group founded in September 1993.
• Livejournal.com Camille Paglia discussion group