Rating: 
Summary: A Misunderstood Work
Review: "Sexual Personae" is the type of galvanizing book that attracts much attention. Camille Paglia is the type of person who seeks attention. Because of her proclivities for media-grabbing, her shock-jock personality, her manic presentation, and some of her more mediocre popular writings, many people have formed an opinion of Dr. Paglia. "Sexual Personae" unfortunately suffers as one of those volumes many have commented on but few have actually read. It is unfairly equated with Paglia's other activity.As one who has in fact read the book, twice by this point, I can say that it is well written, well considered, and an intellectually strong work. Paglia has obviously pondered her premises extensively, and has sought liberal exposure to a wide array of supporting materials through the years. This is a stunning masterwork and deserves to be read for its own sake rather than as a tool for politically polarized zealots to draw lines in the sand. Her hypothesis stimulates thought. She looks at gender roles and relations between the sexes as primary forces in cultural history specifically, in human history in general. Paglia uses interesting tools such as the Apollo-Dionysus tension and the intellect-impulse continuum to examine the evidence she has assembled. She places Art Nouveau in a new prominence in Western culture. I believe that there is actually not so much in this book that reasonable people would find objectionable, for it is the kind of overview and survey that considers many facets of human life and is not as inclined to polemic as one might expect if they saw the author on the television. Paglia's perspective and hypotheses are well served by her unique, highly engaging writing style. Short sentences burst with vitality and fresh ideas. Her outlook is singular and she is unafraid of, nay even drawn to, re-examining conventions. I would recommend that everyone who has bashed or celebrated Paglia pick up the book. It is likely to surprise both camps. It is best read straight through, but being a tour-de-force of daunting size, it can also be approached by seeking parts that address topics of interest. It is a considerable accomplishment, and I suspect the regard it is given will increase as the author's pop culture reputation fades.
Rating:
Summary: Should stand in the Top 5--
Review: --books of the past three decades, I agree. For me, only Farrell's THE MYTH OF MALE POWER and the works of Osho are as important. And Gergen's THE SATURATED SELF. Camille is fabulous. An inellectual dynamo who is hard to naysay. The ring of simple truth forcefully hits you here.
Rating: 
Summary: Dr. Paglia's A brilliant survey of Western cultural icons
Review: Camille Paglia is a brilliant professor of culture who is this groundbreaking work looks with original insight into cultural
art and literary works from the dawn of civilization to the
poetry of Emily Dickinson who she labels the "Sade of America>
Paglia sets us a paradigm of conflict between the sexes throughout history in realms as diverse as politics, art and
literature. Paglia sees the conflict as based on the Apollo instinct in male artists to overcome the dark, watery, earth- centered female.
Through a detailed look at such literary giants as Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte, Whitman, Poe,
Hawthorne, Melville and the late nineteenth century decadents such as Oscar Wilde, Bauldelaire, Gautier, Huysmans and others
she makes original and until now unnoticed observations on the work of each master artist.
The book should be read through to understand her point but students could also use the book to examine the chapters dealing with the particular author or literary/artistic movement they are studying.
Paglia's work is so important it is absud to expect a short review such as this one to do justice to Dr. Paglia's groundbreaking work which will wake up the academy and complacent feminists!
As a disciple of Dr. Harold Bloom this bisexual Italian-American academic is someone the student of the arts should read and savor.
Paglia is controversial but essential reading. I recommend her work and have enjoyed the week I spent with this book!
Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: We have been pagan all along!
Review: Camille Paglia's 'Sexual Personae' is a unique and original exploration of the rich pagan content of much of the greatest Western art and literature which argues that the triumph of Judaeo-Christianity was never as complete as is usually claimed : we have been pagan all along! There are many fine and striking things in this book, but one of the most striking is Paglia's courage in acknowledging Sade. For a brief, interesting, and informative review of the essentials of Sade's position, read Chapter 8 : Return of the Great Mother : Rousseau versus Sade, pp.230-247. And for a startling and wholly original approach to Emily Dickinson, which sees her as being, not the prim "Miss Emily" of high-school teachers and Dickinson cultists, but a Sadeian writer of overwhelming power, see Paglia's Chapter 24 : Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson, pp.623-673. Paglia is a vibrant, dynamic, and eminently commonsensical woman, and is to be commended for having had the courage and honesty to point out that: "The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is a great writer and philosopher whose absence from university curricula illustrates the timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal humanities. No education in the western tradition is complete without Sade. He must be confronted..." (p.235). Given views such as these, it's easy to see why a timid, hypocritical, phony and careerist academe hasn't taken kindly to her. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't. Don't miss this book!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliance dogged by a bifocal argument
Review: Critical Theory, more or less, is that discipline of the Humanities that interprets the Arts via the ideas of philosophy and psychology. Paglia's "Sexual Personae" is a work of critical theory focusing on human sexuality. Paglia assumes the mantle of rogue, apostate feminist in declaring that had the development of civilization been left to women, we would all still be living in swamps. She maintains that aesthetic creation is an intrinsic function of male physiology: basically, men have phalluses and thus they create. Also, whereas female biology has a centrality rooted in the earth, male biology is psychologically peripheral and thus inevitably driven to attempt to dominate and rule the irrepressible female. By extension, then, males are driven to "subdue the earth" through the creation of civilization. From this psychosexual premise, Paglia develops her central thesis: that human sexuality is crucially central to High Culture, that human sexuality inevitably involves power relationships, and that this "gigantic fact" leads inevitably to portrayals in the Arts of relationships characterized by dominance and submission. Her thesis, then, clearly is influenced by the stark human equations championed by de Sade and Sartre. While the first half of "Sexual Personae" is highly entertaining, the second half of the book labors under (what appears to be) the logical inconsistency of Paglia's "hermaphrodite" concept. Paglia argues that up to the Renaissance, European sexual roles and sexual personae - male and female psychologies - were vibrant and well-defined. After that, there commenced a period of diffused "maleness" and "femaleness," resulting in muddled psychosexual conceptions of what had always been, in the good ole days, clear-cut gender roles. In other words, Paglia's central thesis of the centrality of sex in the creation of High Culture starts unintentionally echoing Douglas Adams' hilarious quip in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": invoking a pre-Renaissance golden age when, "Men were REAL men, women were REAL women, and small brown furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small brown furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." Paglia's logical inconsistency lies in her having, on the one hand, to acknowledge C.G. Jung's axiom that creative males inevitably develop their inner feminine, while on the other hand having to argue that this sort of thing *really* is an undesirable, post-Renaissance muddling of psychosexual identity. And so it goes: page after page of Paglia reaffirming ad infinitum how the works of all post-Renaissance male artists clearly portray their vast consuming dread of the "vagina dentata" -- the "devouring vagina." (No, I'm not making this up.) This dread presumably being an inevitable consequence of these artists' collective, psychological hermaphroditism... That said, Paglia's finale - an analysis of Emily Dickinson, whom Paglia refers to as "the American de Sade" - is one of the most compelling and thought-provoking textual analyses in this or any other work of critical theory. By book's end, after all the intellectual pyrotechnics have faded, Paglia has presented a worldview similar to that of Giambattista Vico: not only do we live in Vico's post-mythological world, we apparently also are occupying Paglia's World of Confused Gender Roles tragically inhabited by masculinized women and feminized men. "Sexual Personae" is quirky, brilliant, engaging and encyclopedic: a tour de force of erudition. Recommended to anyone interested in a highly unorthodox appraisal of sexuality in Western Art.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, convincing abstract thinking
Review: First of all, let me say that Camille Paglia is a genius. She has very intelligent and convincing arguments against many prevailing thoughts of the day -- not just in literary theory, but also in social issues. I have to admit that I had to keep my Encyclopedia of Mythology nearby, but as an English major this book spoke volumes to me. Even though Camille and I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue, she is a breath of fresh air in a "politically correct" society. Shs is not afraid to voice her opinions and stay consistent with it in all of her superb arguments. If you want to challenge yourself intellectually, read this book. However, realize that you quite possibly have to raise your level of abstract thinking.
Rating:
Summary: And Camille begat the ten thousand things...
Review: Forget the Tao, in Sexual Personae Camille Paglia comes at you like a panzer division with ten thousand stunning observations about the human experience. The vastness of her landscape is such that it is pointless to itemize individual gems, so I will merely mention the points that struck the greatest chord with me. Just when you thought nobody really understood Emily Bronte and her self-referential prose poem, Wuthering Heights, here comes ole Cam with a dead-on insight into metathesis or literary transexualization. By this process, Bronte created the Byronic Heathcliffe as both her projected animus and inevitably, Cathy's as well. This, Paglia rightly contrasts with Virginia Woolf's sexual transformation of her lover Vita Sackville-West into Orlando. The references to Woolf, Bronte and Dickinson alone make this one of the most invaluable books in the universe. Paglia brilliantly underscores how lesbian and bisexual writers such as Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte and Virgina Woolf can often go where no female writer has gone before because of their erotic access to the Muse, which, as with Sappho, is the source of their empowerment. Lesbian writers... Whaddaya gonna do?
Rating:
Summary: Bowled Over & Still Reeling
Review: Here it is! The most important book in a long long time! The end of the decade, the century, the millenium was the right time for summary and recapitulation, and Paglia delivers this, synthesizing the ideas of Sontag, Norman O. Brown, Harold Bloom, Nietzsche, Freud, Frazer, Leslie Fiedler, and countless others. The book is also a hyperbolic response to prudery and censorship, a corrective that is as extremely lascivious as her "enemies" are extremely priggish. You don't read it so much as immerse yourself in it as in a blissful and scalding bath.
Paglia writes like a boxer boxes: the sentence as fist or metal weapon, the terse epigram, the blithe blasphemy. She has her excesses: her book sizzles with too much sex and aggression; her style is densely referential and assumes every reader is deeply and dazzlingly learned; her scope is so wide and her ambition so great, she may well have bitten off more than she can chew. But don't blame Paglia. Blame the censorship on both sides of the political fence, which have left the 1990s so muted and bland that one has to be this sensational to warrant attention.
The book is an adenalin shot, a slap in the face, a shock from a cattle prod. Hyperbole is its mode. Dickinson may have been subtly sadomasochistic, but I hardly think this was as central to her persona and oeuvre as Paglia seems to think. Who cares? If Paglia is only half-right, it needed saying! Camille's against-the-grain pro-sex, pro-art, pro-male affirmations are still reverberating in 2003. Books like Christina Hoff Sommers' "The War Against Boys," James R. Kincaid's "The Culture of Child Molesting," and Frank Pittman's "Man Enough" all owe or acknowledge their debt to Hurricane Camille. She's right far more than she's wrong. Her quotable, breathtaking first chapter, "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art," is 40 pages of pure punk energy and flat-out the best essay I've ever read! Long after lightweights like Naomi Wolfe are forgotten, Camille Paglia will be studied as the turning point at which we reversed a terrible trend toward male-bashing, antisexuality, and artistic inertia. No one knew that the cloudy centrism of the 1990s would presist into the next century when Paglia made her 1990 debut with her brazen "Sexual Personae." Now it joins Kurt Cobain, the WTO uprising in Seattle, and movies like Fight Club, L.I.E., and American Beauty as "red comets in a smog-filled sky." Nonetheless, it's hard to say exactly what Camille stands for, so diverse are the issues she undertakes in this book, her others, and in her prolific magazine and salon.com contributions. To boil it down, I'd say she's all about openness to sexuality (even drag queens, incest, and man-boy love), love of art (visual, musical, pictorial; plastic and performing), a willingness to take risks (her gripes about the overprotective insularity of suburban white nuclear families), and an embrace of a pagan sensibility against the bleak Gothic sex-phobia of Christianity. I wait eagerly for her promised sequel.
Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Book of the 1990s
Review: I first read "Sexual Personae" right after the 1991 Anita Hill brouhaha, when feminism was at its most dominant position in American culture. Paglia played such a huge role in the destruction of feminism as a credible intellectual force in the 1990s that it's hard to realize just how revolutionary this book was at that point. I'll restrict myself to two points. Her first chapter is the most quotable piece of writing since "Hamlet." In her chapter on Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," she penetrates to the heart of what's funny about the play so well that Wilde's lines are funnier in her essay than they are in the mouths of event the best actors.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant, stunning, original, thought-provoking must-read
Review: I first read this book the week it came out in hardcover in 1990. It stunned me then with its scope and insight and it still does today. The writing is ripe, over-rich; you feel swamped by one powerful metaphor after another. It carries you through it like a tidal wave as it examines the minute and precious and intimate. By her use of sexual archetypes, Paglia seems to have found a kind of Rosetta stone to the understanding of art, creativity and the artists themselves. It practically establishes a new form of literature and certainly establishes a new level of literary criticism. Warning: this book is not a careful, hedging, studious or intellectual endeavor, however. It is, rather, a pure, Promethean, molten firestorm created by an intellect ablaze. There is no other book quite like it in all of literature. It may provoke and shock, but is one of the few books I would label a "must-read." Enjoy.
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