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Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
From ancient Egypt through the nineteenth century, Sexual Personae explores the provocative connections between art and pagan ritual; between Emily Dickinson and the Marquis de Sade; between Lord Byron and Elvis Presley. It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.
Paperback, 718 pages
Published
August 20th 1991
by Random House/Vintage Books (NYC)
(first published 1990)
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Paglia--a friend of mine once said to her face at a Barnes & Noble signing--is a gateway drug. I got ahold of this in high school and it functioned as a syllabus for the next few years. She showed me how raunchy, perverse and gorgeously gilded Spenser can be. She turned me on to Gautier, Pater, and, above all others, to Baudelaire. I continue to return to her readings of Byron and Wilde. This book is nigh-impossible to read cover to cover. Don't try it. The prose is an unceasingly percussive...more
20 likes · like · see review
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Nov 13, 2011
Erik Graff
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
no one
Recommended to Erik by:
Paula DeVoto
Shelves:
literature
I will usually read the books I'm given and this one was from a coworker at Loyola University Chicago. I doubt if she, a believing Catholic, read it herself. She likely would have been even more offended than I was.
With the exception of overt, practiced racism and sexism, I believe I'm hard to offend, but Paglia's two-faced book did it. On the one hand, she tries to be sexy, treating the literary canon as resting on a seething bed of academically neglected eroticism. On the other hand, she write...more
With the exception of overt, practiced racism and sexism, I believe I'm hard to offend, but Paglia's two-faced book did it. On the one hand, she tries to be sexy, treating the literary canon as resting on a seething bed of academically neglected eroticism. On the other hand, she write...more
7 likes · like · see review
Apr 01, 2011
dusty rebel
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
books-that-will-forever-live-next-t,
favorites
As another reviewer said Paglia is like a "gateway drug". Read her and you’re on your way down the yellow brick road of subversive decadence. Whether you agree with her or not, you will be challenged to think. Camille isn’t looking for a gaggle of cheerleaders, she looking for an intellectual bar brawl.
Camille Paglia!
GodDAMN I want her. She inadvertantly turned me into the psychopath reader I am today, but doing a line by line interpretation of "Stairway To Heaven" in Guitar World about 10 years ago. This close reading of a classic, unavoidable song blew me right away and impressed me, showing me that brainy reading is something even I could do.
There's a lot of repetiton here, I mean how many times can you hear about the gilded masochistic whatever in repressive societal repressiveness until...more
An incomparable and highly unique study of sexuality and literature. I took my time reading this as there is a huge amount of information to absorb, and Paglia's style (made up of brief but incredibly pungent sentences) is wearying, although I don't mean that as a criticism. In the contrary, it gives the reader all the more reason to savor this radically different take on Emily Dickinson, The Fearie Queen, Shakespeare, Whitman, and so many more. One needn't agree with all or even most of what sh...more
Ah, Camille Paglia. What can I say that hasn't already been said? This book is well-written and absorbing, but if you are a female with half a backbone at all, you will want to rip it into pieces, piss on it, then set it on fire (which I guess won't be very effective if you just pissed on it). Paglia's main thesis is that men are the movers and shakers, and women are slothful baby producers. Civilation wouldn't exist without men because women have no drive to do anything except sit around and wa...more
Nov 16, 2012
Chris
marked it as intermittently-reading
Mint condition for ninety-nine cents—an unbeatable deal, even with the Canuck dollar scorching along at record breaking levels (thanks stuffy Big Six Banks and innate Canadian caution!)—and an author I've not a lot of experience with. I've heard lots about Paglia, split pretty evenly into camps that, whether they love or loathe her, seem to share the opinion that a little bit of Camille goes a long way. The recent columns of hers that I've stumbled across generally contain a dram of counter-intu...more
Jun 07, 2011
mark monday
rated it
2 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
all-fucked-up,
guidebooks
camille paglia: so misguided! despite the sheer idiocy behind many of her theses, she is a compelling, exuberant author, very readable, and definitely brings a certain kind of gusto and an often unique viewpoint to many classic authors. her rather operatic take on emily dickinson is particularly enjoyable. if this book in any way acts as a gateway drug to classic literature, then i suppose there is something positive to it all. that said, and exciting writing style aside, her reductive view of t...more
13 likes · like · see review
A clearly insane person. A clearly fierce intellect. (It is clear that her intellect is fierce; not that the fierceness possesses great clarity.) I won't be putting this down unless it's to throw it in front of an oncoming train and/or soak it with my sad, sad, non-transcendent womanly piss.
(Falls under the "etc" in "feminism-etc." No shit.)
(Falls under the "etc" in "feminism-etc." No shit.)
Both broad in its scope and highly essentialist (in the best sense of the word), Sexual Personae is - aside from a slight slump when writing about the early Romantics - consistently interesting. It does justice to its theme of sexual personae in art and literature, analyzing the Decadent impulse as it first appears in Ancient Egypt, and tracing it through to the late 19th/ early 20th century. There are too many great moments to mention, but I will try naming a few: the chapters on Renaissance ar...more
This book was horrible. Paglia's worldview is bizarrely Freudian. Paglia writes only the loosest and most unsatisfactory of evidence for any of her assertions. She ignores the lack of evidence for the majority of psychodynamic theory in general and for the "family romance" in particular. When you ignore empirical evidence all you have left is what resonates for you personally, which Freudian theory does not. Though she even picks through psychodynamic theory. The book makes me want to shake her....more
OK, so her theoretical basis is absolute bullshit, combining personal bias, excessive Freudianism, and reactionary sexual politics into an obnoxious combination. However, the analyses themselves are quite wonderful. Having sat through any number of dry college lectures on the deemed classics of the Western canon, it was nice to see their dark, chthonic qualities exposed. This doesn't have the academic rigor that I was expecting, but it was a very fun read, and now I feel like going back through...more
Jun 18, 2008
Merrie
added it
Recommends it for:
extremely well-read people who think feminists are silly
Tried reading this last time I played Camille Paglia, and I'm determined to get through the whole thing this time. I'm taking notes on it because it's a very dense read. She loves the theories of the chthonian vs. Apollonian states of being. I can't even pronounce chthonian. It's beginning to sink in though, which is a little bit scary.
Can't say that I agree with her politics, but she's a smart cookie. Occasionally I have to shake my head and put it down. And go read Tammy Faye Bakker Messner's...more
Can't say that I agree with her politics, but she's a smart cookie. Occasionally I have to shake my head and put it down. And go read Tammy Faye Bakker Messner's...more
Camille Paglia's completely obnoxious and over-the-line and I only agree with her about 1/4 of the time. But when I do, I feel like she's slit open the deepest rivers of impassioned, tangled instincts I have about intellectual women and the utter foolishness of much of the feminist movement - and the dangers of being a woman who lives too far above the waist. Paglia nails it on these topics. Even tho' I'm sure if I ever sat next to her at a dinner party I'd end up wanting to slap her.
Sexual Personae was a bombshell of guerilla scholarship released in the 1990s, and it made its author - Camille Paglia - a star and media darling during that time. The scope of the book is breathtaking. Paglia begins by summarizing Freud's theory on the invention of religion in pre-history, then goes on to track the human agon of art v. nature from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the nineteen hundreds.
Paglia sees two archetypal forces at work in literature and art: The Appolonian (concerned...more
Paglia sees two archetypal forces at work in literature and art: The Appolonian (concerned...more
This book single-handedly resurrected my love of literature, philosophy and history. What is especially good about it is its preference for the enduring truths of human experience over faddish post-modernism.
I didn't complete it. I got through chapter 1, but that was enough. Maybe Paglia writes interestingly about literature later in the book, as some say here, but I figured I could find others writing well about literature without wasting time on sensationalistic and ultra-convoluted social hypotheses like Paglia's. Statistically speaking (how anti-chthonic), probably about 15% of the words in this book are VERY worth reading. Problem is, they're dispersed among an ocean of mendacity and pseudo-sch...more
Do not get me wrong, I do not buy into all of her theories. Some sound like utter BS, but she is SO fun to read and argue with (in your head). What makes me love this book is the way she categorizes authors and works, and all the little details she points out. How some male authors are femenine in their writing and some females are masculine. Also, this is the book that lead me to works I may have never read. I did not go to school to become an english professor and am not required to have more...more
Wow. If you choose to read this, get ready for the ride of your life! It's typical Paglia--all about sex and making some wild argumentative leaps--but gives good food for thought, particularly if you are familiar with the canonical interpretations for the works of art and literature that she covers. Sadly, my grasp of literature was not sufficient to keep up and I had to skip whole sections, specifically, anything that was not Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson. But on the visual art sections I was...more
"Come on guys, old dead white guys aren't so bad."
Oct 14, 2012
Lisa (Harmonybites)
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Those Interested in Literature and Art
Shelves:
non-fiction,
writing,
philosophy,
political,
psychology,
libertarian,
art,
history,
religion,
spirituality
The subtitle? "Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson." (The cover strikingly puts that across visually with a bust half-Nefertiti/half-Dickenson.) In the Preface Paglia says her book "seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture." She also revealingly says: "My largest ambition is to fuse Frazer and Freud." I think she succeeds in that fusion, but I can't say that impressed me much, given I'm very skeptical about both thinkers. Freud was famous for his theory of...more
This book is one of my all-time favorites and my favorite of Paglia's. I prefer Paglia the "academic" as opposed to the "media whore" (IE as she expresses herself in her columns in Salon.com), as I am at least 50% in disagreement with her political, geopolitical and Libertarian POV. In "Sexual Personae" she presents herself in full-on scholarly mode--in a way she has not, unfortunately, repeated since this work was published. I have read this book at least twice--it is rare for me, as a reader,...more
A bit of an academic show-off, and later, a celebrity-hound, with some really f*cked-up ideas about the importance of Madonna, Paglia penned her most important (and best-written) book here. Won't say it changed my life, but I couldn't stop talking about for weeks after I finished it. Her take on Emily Dickinson as a super-sadist is dead on the money. This will be read long after everyone has forgotten the pseudo-feminist junk that was popular when this book debuted. You know who I'm talking abou...more
Camille Paglia escribe al enloquecido ritmo del rock'n'roll que tanto admria, en su lista de artistas están Madonna y Mick Jagger, para enseñarnos que la Naturaleza es cruel y misteriosa, que el arte es sugerente y cruel, que el mundo y el sexo se divide, como Nietzsche nos enseñó en el Nacimiento de la Tragedia, en apolíneo y dionisíaco y que es el pulso esencial del arte y de la vida. Y nunca antes ser decadente había sido tan sexy, disparatado y maravilloso.
I read the last chapter, on Emly Dickinson, first, as part of my book group discussion of Dickinson's poetry. Then I read the chapters on other authors I have read, then the rest of the book. It ranged from 3 to 5 stars, but I give it at lest 4.25 overall. Paglia is opinionated, amusing, and often thought-provoking. This perspective on literature would have been useful when I was in school - which unfortunately predates her book.
Paglia's seminal work on gender, art and culture. It is a dense read, academic in nature. And if one does not have a thorough grounding in the classics one will acquire it or get a little lost. Even if you are, keeping a note pad handy to jot down notes and read or view the art and literature to which she refers is a good idea. It took me six months to read because of stopping, reading something she references and then returning.
Aug 13, 2008
Tara
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
lit crit., culture studies, gender studies
So far, I'm loving this book! I read a little bit of it each evening so that I can at least attempt to really digest her argument. Some of the things she says are a little scary. But, like Angela Carter's work, Paglia definitely wants to create an emotional response in her readers and she does this brilliantly. I think the elicitation of emotional response - whether in agreement or anger - forces us to examine standard cultural beliefs and grants an opportunity for different ways of seeing. Pagl...more
Aug 27, 2012
Motoko
rated it
2 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
books-i-love-while-thinking-they-re
this is a great book to read if you like reading the thoughts of insane people. i actually do that, so this book was mesmerizing, but don't confuse it for a feminist or 'anti-feminist' classic, or even a lucid book. if you like reading books for the novelty of getting inside the author's mind, though, this is a very interesting read, similar to Orson Scott Card and Fouacoult.
Professor Paglia takes the Nietzschean antithesis from the "Birth of Tragedy" (Apollonian order and structure versus Dipnysian ecstasy and chaos) further than anyone I know. Puts writers like Shakespeare in a very different, Dionysian light. A must read for anyone interested in Art, Literature and Cultural History.
Texts about other texts are usually a shadowy and secondary reading experience. Not this one. Its energy grabs you by the throat and shakes you. Sometimes it rattles your teeth, and you wish to be put down, but I found that the book boosted my desire to read other books, and the enjoyment I got from them.
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Camille Anna Paglia 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. She is a professor of humanities and media studies 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 fe...more
More about Camille Paglia...
She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist fe...more
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