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Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson Pdf FREE SEXUAL PERSONAE: ART AND DECADENCE FROM NEFERTITI TO EMILY DICKINSON PDF Camille Paglia | 718 pages | 01 Feb 1992 | Random House USA Inc | 9780679735793 | English | New York, United States Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia Description Here is the fiery, provocative, and unparalleled work of feminist art criticism that launched Camille Paglia's exceptional career as one of our most important public intellectuals. Is Emily Dickinson "the female Sade"? Is Donatello's David a bit of pedophile pornography? How do liberals and feminists--as well as conservatives--fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerrilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since Egyptians invented beauty--making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Product Details Price. Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program. Become an affiliate. A regular contributor to Salon. Reviews "A remarkable book, at once outrageous and compelling, fanatical and brilliant. One must be awed by [Paglia's] vast energy, erudition and wit. Close to poetry. Conversation Starters from ReadingGroupChoices. Sexual Personae - Wikipedia Camille Paglia, who clearly believes that big books should start with a big bang, makes the following pronouncements on the first page of ''Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'': ''Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture. That's quite a laundry list, even for a page book. Still, Ms. Paglia manages to keep most of her promises. Ostensibly a critical study of the representation of human sexuality in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson art, ''Sexual Personae'' is also a scorched-earth Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson on the underlying philosophical assumptions of liberalism and feminism. Such attacks are not taken lightly in the academy these days, and Ms. Paglia is doubtless being picketed at this very moment by a gang of irate undergraduates. But Ms. Paglia, an associate professor of humanities at Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts, is no conservative, either, and any canon- loving traditionalist who takes the trouble to read her book from cover to cover is more than likely to join Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson picket lines. The Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson of ''Sexual Personae'' runs Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson as follows: Nature is barbarous and violent, though people choose to pretend that it is benevolent rather than succumb to utter despair. Art can be either Apollonian, camouflaging the ''dehumanizing brutality'' of nature, or Dionysian, accepting and celebrating it. The Apollonian striving for order is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is responsible for ''western personality and western achievement. Paglia prefers the term ''chthonic'' that liberal humanists prefer not to acknowledge. In art, the chthonic realities of nature are typically represented by sexual symbolism, which is usually violent and compulsive. Paglia argues, ''have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics. Paglia believes to be omnipresent in Western art; a sequel devoted to popular culture is in the works. All of this may sound rather conventional, if not actually stodgy, but Ms. Paglia heats things up considerably by drawing a flashy assortment of extreme conclusions from her basic premises. Not only does she praise ''the spectacular glory of male civilization,'' she flatly rejects Rousseau's vision of ''benign Romantic nature'' and its offspring, ''the progressivist strain in nineteenth-century culture, for which social reform was the means to achieve paradise on earth. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. Paglia's aggressive antiliberalism is deceptive, however. While she pays lip service to traditional Western values ''Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. Far from merely arguing for the significance of the chthonian dimension of Western art, Ms. Paglia positively wallows in it. A self-styled ''advocate of aestheticism and Decadence,'' she seems to believe that decadent art is great precisely because it is decadent - that is, because it offers a truer vision of ''the amorality of the instinctual life'' and thus provides Apollonian civilization with a necessary catharsis for its chthonic fears and fantasies. The ability to infuriate both antagonists in an ideological struggle is often a sign of a first-rate book. Paglia is constantly tripping over her own pretentiousness. Paglia's esthetic judgment is as erratic as her self-esteem is healthy. Paglia's elaborate schema of sexual symbolism, impressive though it may sound in the telling, has led her to construct a bizarre anticanon of decadence in which earnest dullards like Charles Dickens and Henry James are shoved aside in favor of that old fraud, the Marquis de Sade. Sade, to be sure, is not without his significance. Mario Praz and Edmund Wilson, to name only two critics of distinction, recognized and acknowledged his noxious influence on various key figures in the Romantic movement. Paglia is not merely interested in Sade - she admires him. She is, in fact, the latest of the Sade cultists who have been haunting the fringes of serious literary criticism for decades. Like the rest of her fellow Sadeans, she complains that her idol is underrated and ignored, ''the most unread major writer in western literature. No education in the western tradition is complete without Sade. After reading ''Sexual Personae,'' one rather expects Camille Paglia to turn up, whip in hand, as a character in David Lodge's next novel, locking horns with Morris Zapp at a Modern Language Association convention. Paglia is quite real, though, and she is also a conspicuously gifted writer. She is an exciting if purple stylist and an admirably close reader with a hard core of common sense. For all its flaws, her first book is every bit as intellectually stimulating as it is exasperating. But ''Sexual Personae'' is tainted with the kind of symbol- mongering reductionism that sees one thing in everything, and despite its considerable virtues, it left me thinking of Earl Long's pithy appraisal of Henry Luce and his notoriously single-minded magazines: ''Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them. The mother herself presses turgidly on the late novels, a paralyzing biographical force. We feel her hovering in his ornate style. She is also the channel of the daemonic, through which man is crushed and humiliated by nature. He is detained by her in a median state, halfway between Romanticism and the social novel, his artistic goal. So we wait - and wait and wait. Nothing ever happens in James. James's repressions and evasions are many, varied, and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredded James novels in their hands, I cannot say. But if James is understood as a Late Romantic, a Decadent. George Moore called James a self-made ''eunuch,'' implying he was a prude and sissy. This is much too simple. Sex cannot be understood apart from nature. James's rhetorical impediments and frustrations arise from a suppression of the daemonic, in which sex is included but to which sex too is subject. Books Siding With the Men. View on timesmachine. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. By Camille Paglia. New Haven: Yale University Press. From ''Sexual Personae. Home Page World U. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia: | : Books Look Inside. How do liberals and feminists—as well as conservatives—fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerrilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since Egyptians invented beauty— making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature. Close to poetry. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. The Biggest Books of the Month. Category: Literary Criticism Philosophy. Aug 20, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Paperback —. Also by Camille Paglia. See all books by Camille Paglia. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Matricide in Language. Miglena Nikolchina. Jim Morrison. Kipling: Poems. Rudyard Kipling. Relations with the Natural World. Jonathan Towers. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Philip Booth. Selected Poems. Jorge Luis Borges. Act V Scene I. Stanley Moss. Tears for Water. Women and Other Monsters. Jess Zimmerman. Herman Melville. A Strange Relief. The Art of Drag. The Pocket Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson. Dance We Do. Ntozake Shange. Breathing Room. Peter Davison. Shakespeare: Invention of the Human. Harold Bloom. The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book. Foxfire Fund, Inc. Wild Horses, Wild Dreams. And Yet. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson Steffler. All of Us. Raymond Carver. The Voice of the Poet: Richard Wilbur. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson Wilbur. Red Bird. Against Everything.
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