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Camille Paglia | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Professor and Cultural critic |
| Nationality | United States |
| Education | Binghamton University Yale University |
| Period | 1974– |
| Subject | Popular Culture, Art, Poetry, Sex, Film, Feminism |
Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947) is a US author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia[1], a self-described dissident feminist[2], has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984. She is the author of the best selling 1990 work of literary criticism Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, as well as four other books. She writes articles on art, popular culture, feminism, and politics for mainstream newspapers and magazines. Paglia is known as a critic of American feminism, and is also strongly critical of the influence of French writers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
Characterized variously as a "contrarian academic" and a feminist "bête noire",[3][4] a "controversialist",[5] and a maverick,[6] Paglia is known for her critical views of many aspects of modern culture, including feminism and liberalism.[7][8] Paglia "advocates a core curriculum based mostly on the classics" and rails against "chic French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan." She also "has a strong libertarian streak -- on subjects like pornography -- that go straight to her '60s coming-of-age."[3] Paglia's Sexual Personae was rejected by numerous publishers, but when finally published, became a best seller, reaching seventh place on the paperback best-seller list, a rare accomplishment for a scholarly book.[3]
Sexual Personae was published by Yale University Press after being rejected by seven other publishers. Paglia called it her "prison book", commenting, "I felt like Cervantes, Genet. It took all the resources of being Catholic to cut myself off and sit in my cell."[9]
In 2005, Paglia was named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals by the journals Foreign Policy and The Prospect.[10]
Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, the elder daughter of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (Colapietro) Paglia. Both of her parents immigrated to the United States from Italy.[7] Paglia attended primary school in rural Oxford, New York, where her family lived in a working farmhouse.[11] Her father, a veteran of World War II,[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.[3] She attended the Edward Smith Elementary school, T. Aaron Levy Junior High and William Nottingham High School.[13] 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.".[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 took a variety of names when she was at Spruce Ridge Camp, including Anastasia (her confirmation name, inspired by the Ingrid Bergman film Anastasia); 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]
For over a decade, Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex.[17][18] Paglia legally adopted Maddex's son (who was born in 2002).[10] In 2009, the couple separated.[19]
Paglia entered Harpur College at Binghamtom University in 1964.[9] The same year, Paglia's poem "Atrophy" was published in her local newspaper.[20] 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".[21] She graduated from Harpur as class valedictorian in 1968.[3]
According to Paglia, while in college she punched a "marauding drunk",[16] and takes pride in having been put on probation for committing 39 pranks.[13]
Paglia attended Yale as a graduate student, and she claims to have been the only open lesbian at Yale Graduate School from 1968 to 1972.[16][22] 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.[23]
At Yale, Paglia was mentored by Harold Bloom.[9] It 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".[24]
Paglia read Susan Sontag, and aspired to emulate what she called her "celebrity, her positioning in the media world at the border of the high arts and popular culture." Paglia first saw Sontag in person on October 15, 1969 (Vietnam Moratorium Day), when Paglia, then a Yale graduate student, was visiting a friend at Princeton. In 1973, Paglia, a militant feminist and open lesbian, was working at her first academic job at Bennington College. She considered Sontag a radical who had challenged male dominance. The same year, Paglia drove to an appearance by Sontag at Dartmouth, hoping to arrange for her to speak at Bennington, but found it difficult to find the money for Sontag's speaking fee; Paglia relied on help from Richard Tristman, a friend of Sontag's, to persuade her to come. Bennington College agreed to pay Sontag $700 (twice what they usually offered speakers but only half Sontag's usual fee) to give a talk about contemporary issues. Paglia staged a poster campaign urging students to attend Sontag's appearance. Sontag arrived at Bennington Carriage Barn, where she was to speak, more than an hour late, and then began reading what Paglia recalled as a "boring and bleak" short story about "nothing" in the style of a French New Novel.[25]
As a result of Sontag's Bennington College appearance, Paglia began to become disenchanted with her, believing that she had withdrwawn from confrontation with the academic world, and that her "mandarin disdain" for popular culture showed an elitism that betrayed her early work, which had suggested that high and low culture both reflected a new sensibility. In 1992, Paglia attacked Sontag; according to Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, this was a way of saying, "I'm the next stage of you." Questioned about Paglia by the Brazilian magazine Istoe, Sontag said she should form a rock band.[25] Sontag later said of Paglia, "We used to think Norman Mailer was bad, but she makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen".[26]
In the fall 1972, Paglia began teaching at Bennington College, which hired her in part thanks to a recommendation from Harold Bloom.[27] At Bennington, she befriended the philosopher James Fessenden, who first taught there that very semester.[28]
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, Millett 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,[29] in which she discussed Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, followed by remarks on Diana Ross, Gracie Allen, Yul Brynner, and Stephane Audran.[30]
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.[31] Similar fights with feminists and academics culminated in a 1978 incident which led her to resign from Bennington a year later. After a lengthy standoff with the administration, Paglia accepted a settlement from the college and resigned the following year.[32]
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. 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. 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". She wrote articles on New Haven's historic pizzerias and on an old house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad.[33]
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.
Paglia is on the editorial board of the classics and humanities journal Arion.[34] Paglia has announced that she is currently working on "a study of the visual arts intended as a companion book to Break, Blow, Burn".[35]
Paglia cooperated with Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock in their writing of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, sending them detailed letters from which they quoted with her permission. Rollyson and Paddock note that Sontag "had her lawyer put our publisher on notice" when she realized that they were investigating her life and career.[25]
Paglia has been characterized as an "anti-feminist feminist", critical of central features of much contemporary feminism but holding out "her own special variety of feminist affirmation."[36] Martha Duffy writes that Paglia "does not hesitate to hurl brazen insults", noting that Paglia accused Germaine Greer of becoming "a drone in three years" as a result of her early success, and called Diana Fuss's output "just junk - appalling!"[3] Paglia has accused Kate Millett of starting "the repressive, Stalinist style in feminist criticism...".[37]
Many feminists have criticized Paglia. Gloria Steinem said of Paglia that, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic."[38] Paglia said that Steinem, who she accused of not having read her, had compared her to Hitler and Sexual Personae to Mein Kampf.[39] Paglia called Steinem "the Stalin of feminism."[6]
Naomi Wolf traded a series of sometimes personal attacks with Paglia throughout the early 1990s. 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" and characterized Paglia's writing as "full of howling intellectual dishonesty".[40][41][42][43]
Katha Pollitt has characterized Paglia as one of a "seemingly endless parade of social critics [who] have achieved celebrity by portraying not sexism but feminism as the problem." Pollitt writes that Paglia has glorified "male dominance", and has been able to get away with calling the Spur Posse California high school date-rape gang "beautiful", among other things "that might make even Rush Limbaugh blanch", because she is a woman.[44]
Paglia is critical of the influence modern French writers have had on the humanities, claiming that universities are in the "thrall" of Post-modernists,[45], that in the works of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, she never once found a sentence that interested her[46] and that Post-structuralism has broken the link between the word and the thing, and thus endangers the western canon.[47] François Cusset writes that Paglia, like other major American public intellectuals after World War II, owes her broader recognition mainly to the political repercussions of polemics that first erupted on college campuses, in her case to a polemic against foreign intellectualism. He says she achieved phenomenal success when she called Foucault a "bastard", thereby providing (together with Alan Sokal's Social Text parody) the best evidence for Paul de Man's view that theory should be defined negatively, based on the opposition it arouses.[48] However, Paglia's assessment of French writers is not purely negative. She has called Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex "brilliant" and "the only thing undergraduate sex study needs", and identified Jean-Paul Sartre's work as part of a high period in literature. Paglia has made positive comments about Roland Barthes's Mythologies and Gilles Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, while finding both men's later work flawed. Of Gaston Bachelard, who influenced Paglia, she wrote "[his] dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method seemed to me ideal for art", adding that he was "the last modern French writer I took seriously".[49][50][51]
Critics have characterized some of her views as conservative,[3] but Paglia characterizes herself as a Clinton Democrat and Libertarian.[6][45] She opposes laws against prostitution, pornography, drugs, and abortion.[52] Paglia criticized Clinton for not resigning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which she says led to America being "blindsided by 9/11".[53] In the 2000 US presidential campaign she voted for the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, "[because] I detest the arrogant, corrupt superstructure of the Democratic Party, with which I remain stubbornly registered".[53] In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Paglia supported Barack Obama.[54]
In Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) Paglia argues that human nature has an inherently dangerous Dionysian aspect, especially in regard to human sexuality.[55] Culture and civilization are created by men and represent an attempt to contain that force.[55] Women are powerful, too, but as natural forces, and both marriage and religion are means to contain chaotic forces.[3] A best seller, described by Terry Teachout in a New York Times book review as flawed, but "...every bit as intellectually stimulating as it is exasperating."[56] Martha Duffy wrote that the book had a "neoconservative cultural message" which was well received by many, but rejected by many feminists.[3] In a review of Sexual Personae, feminist author Molly Ivins accused Paglia of historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations.[57] In his review, Anthony Burgess described Sexual Personae as "a fine disturbing book..." that "...seeks to attack the reader's emotions as well as his / her prejudices."[58]
Germaine Greer writes that Paglia's insights into Sappho are "vivid and extremely perceptive", but also "unfortunately inconsistent and largely incompatible with each other." Greer quotes Paglia writing that Sappho internalized rather than externalized her passion for the girls she fell in love with, and replies that, "No poet can be said to internalize passion." Greer also denies Paglia's claim that there is a "hostile distance between sexual personae" in Sappho's poetry, as well as her suggestion that the poet was "deprived of emotion", writing in response that "She is literally awash with emotion which comes from looking at the beloved for even the shortest time. Her emotional potency is on display, and implicitly compared with the nullity of the man who sits opposite her idol and hears her voice and laughter." Greer credits Paglia with making the point that "Sappho understood that there is no reciprocity in love, that harmony is not the human condition, and that the gods are not on our side", but believes that Paglia's "misreading" of the "Hymn to Aphrodite" conceals this from her.[59]
Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992) is a collection of short pieces, many published previously as editorials or reviews, and some transcripts of interviews.[52] It made the New York Times bestseller list for paperbacks.[60]
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005) is a collection of 43 short selections of verse with an accompanying essay by Paglia.[61] The collection is primarily oriented to those unfamiliar with the works, but does not pander to the new reader.[61] Clive Jones notes that Paglia tends to focus on American works as it moves from Shakespeare forward through time, with Yeats, following Coleridge, as the last European discussed,[61] but emphasized her range of sympathy and her ability to juxtapose and unite distinct art forms in her analysis.[61] In his review, Christopher Nield remarks that Paglia has "a rare gift to capture a poem’s mood and scene in terse, spiky phrases of descriptive insight" and exhibits moments of brilliance, but also notes that some of her selections from recent writers fall flat. He also praises her pedagogical slant towards basic interpretation, suggesting that her approach might be what is required to reinvigorate studies in the humanities.[47]