Rating: 
Summary: High Frequency Soundbites
Review: Miss Paglia has written only one major oeuvre so far: this is it. The rest of her fame - and fortune - rests on TV appearances, lines on sex and power and a praising article on Madonna as feminist icon.
Personally i would've gone for PJ Harvey or Björk, but they only became world wide famous in the 90s, so i guess La Paglia is a victim of time. In more ways than one...
Simply put, this book has some very good chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 17 (more or less), 20/21 (both on Wilde) and a neatish 24. Chapter number one and number 8 (the latter on Sade and Rousseau) r really an amazing summary of her worldview. I would've linked Sade w/ Kant instead of Rousseau, but i suspect that's because i'm not american.
Then the bad bit: she, like her guru Harold Bloom, generalises 2 cre8 a nice theoretical pattern. I can't even begin 2 pinpoint how she does it: but it must be a cocktail of Wildean epigrams w/ some weird Freudian nonsense about sex. It's very 60s, very guerrilla, very kitsch - and very d8ed. It's like Che Guevara: the difference between taking the man seriously and buying a T-shirt w/ his face printed because he looks like a male model and the communists had some good design ideas anyway. Ms Paglia takes her theories very seriously, whether she pretends 2 or not. I don't. I like the way contemporary literary criticism sounds like polysyllabical mumbo-jumbo for the semantically hallucin8ed: it gives us something 2 hope for after watching South Park. I also do not believe the world and art can be summarised by simplistic comments that attract initially as much as they repel in hindsight. For a person of Philosophical background she is reading turned upside down: @ first alluring, but progressively disenchanting.
Or maybe i'm merely a decadent semiotic post-modern blur waiting for the contraceptive pill 2 sounds outrageous again.
Yeah.
Rating: 
Summary: A brilliant mix of belles-lettres and philosophy
Review: Paglia has gotten so much press in recent years, due to her self-transformation from obscure academic into media pundit, that it's easy to sniff at the awe-inspiring strengths of her first and greatest book. There is something in "Sexual Personae" to annoy and upset everyone - but Paglia irritates because her brilliant mind neatly and decisively rips apart received ideas. By asserting the truth of certain basic oppositions - Apollo/Dionysos, Christian/Pagan, male/female - Paglia creates a thinking-space where we can see how art and literature have flourished in the tense zone between these poles. You cannot help but admire the range and depth of her erudition and interests, particularly in an age where American intellectuals say more and more about less and less. Paglia's prose is clear, dramatic, and of an adamantine brilliance that, in its better passages (the introduction, "Renaissance Art," and "Pagan Beauty," come to mind) stuns yo! u with its insights. I applaud her defense of the male imagination's sexual peculiarities, always kept on a short leash in Puritan America, and greatly look forward to the second volume. This book should be required reading in freshman composition courses. Reading this book changed my view of reality permanently. Paglia says many thing which I had always sensed, but could never put into words. The firestorm of opposition which her ideas have generated merely indicates her strength as a thinker. You owe it to yourself to read this book!
Rating:
Summary: The most important book of the last 3 decades
Review: Paglia's "Sexual Personae" is a massive work of Olympian learning; the most important book of the last 3 decades and certainly one of the greatest literary tomes of the century. This book in itself is utterly more valuable than a complete undergraduate education at one of our most prestigious universities."Sexual Personae" embodies the kind of hard-thinking discussions of art and philosophy so direly needed as the 20th century comes to a close. Paglia forces us to see the embedded truth in old sexual stereotypes, easily cuts through the muddled sentimentalism of current poststructuralist jargon, and implores us to take stock of ourselves in an ascetic, self-responsible and disciplined way using wit, wisdom, and aesthetics as tools of self-knowledge in a turbulent age of decadent Empire. Paglia sees human history through art with an all-knowing, unapologetic eye to the point of sophisticated fatigue. She revives the ancient Greek concept of the Apollo/Dionysus continuum, she is honest about human social and sexual catharsis, and for all the talk about Paganism these days Paglia forces us to come to terms with the concept in a way that removes its [beautiful and horrifying] dualities from the sterile, solipsistic MickeyMouse playground on which it has been snidely and carelessly tossed by lazy new-age boomer "intellectuals"--so blindly at the expense of the well-being of the next generation of philosophical thinkers. In many ways, "Sexual Personae" is a kind of intellectual call-to-arms for Generation X. Paglia is brave, shows that she cares, and is willing to take abuse and get tough in order to get the job done. It is the Bible of the 1990's, and an indespensible book for knowing ourselves and our world.
Rating:
Summary: this is really something to read . . .
Review: This book is a tremendous monument in critical exploration. One cannot leave it in good conscience without first reckoning with its startling provocations. First you read, then you digest - and it is like processing a rock through your bowels. Paglia is brilliant.
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