Encyclopedia
Camille Anna Paglia is a social critic, intellectual, author, and teacher. She is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has been called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate",
one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a
feminist bisexual egomaniac" .
Introduction
Paglia is an intellectual of many seeming contradictions: a
classicist who champions art both high and low, with a view that human nature is inherently dangerous, while at the same time celebrating
dionysian revelry in the wilder, darker sides of human sexuality.
She came to public attention shortly after the publication of her first book,
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, in 1990, when she began writing about popular culture and
feminism in mainstream newspapers and magazines. As a public intellectual, Paglia challenged the positions of the so-called "liberal establishment" at the time, which included figures in media, academia, activism and politics such as
Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, professors at many Ivy League universities, and organizations such as National Organization for Women and ACT UP.
She describes herself as a
feminist, and as a Democrat who voted for
Bill Clinton and
Ralph Nader. Her world view embraces risque elements such as fetishism,
pornography, and
prostitution. She is a critic of contemporary feminists, comparing victim-focused feminists with the Moonies. As a proponent for the legalization of recreational drugs and prostitution, and the lowering of sexual consent laws, she identified herself with
libertarian thought.
Critical of the influence that French philosophers
Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault had on the teaching of humanities in American academia, she supported comparative religion,
art history and the close reading of canonical literature being brought to the center of
education, with greater attentiveness toward chronology and facts in the student's approach to history.
Her most notable allies and supporters , were
Andrew Sullivan, Christina Hoff Sommers, Virginia Postrel,
Harold Bloom,
Bill Maher, and
Matt Drudge. Elise Sutton, a dominatrix who advocates female domination of males, describes Paglia as a female supremacist and a friend.
In addition to writing books, she has been a columnist for
Salon.com since its inception, is currently a contributing editor at
Interview magazine, and is on the editorial board of the classics and humanities journal
Arion. She continues to write articles and reviews for popular media and scholarly journals, such as her long article, "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s," published in
Arion in winter 2003.
In September 2005, she was ranked #20 in a survey of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" in the world, in a list compiled jointly by editors of the journals "Foreign Policy" and "The Prospect" . The list, which included only 10 women, also included feminist thinkers
Germaine Greer,
Martha Nussbaum, and Julia Kristeva.
She is currently writing a third essay collection for Vintage Books, and working on a book to serve as a companion piece to
Break, Blow, Burn, which will be concerned with the
visual arts rather than poetry.
Biography
Camille Anna Paglia was born April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York. She was the first of two daughters by Pasquale and Lydia Anne Paglia. Her mother was born in Ceccano, Italy. Her father's family came from
Benevento,
Avellino, and Caserta.
The Paglia household had little money, but the parents exposed their daughter to classical Western art and culture; and throughout her childhood, she was drawn to several figures in art, popular culture and history. These interests would continue throughout her life, and deeply influence her work as a scholar and critic. For example, she said that the first music to leave an impression on her was
Bizet's
Carmen is a French [i] opera [i] by Georges Bizet [i]. ...
, an opera which, in her words, "struck me with electrifying force." She was three when she first heard it, but she was still enamored with the opera and was writing about it over 40 years later.
Paglia's primary school years were spent in rural Oxford, New York, where her family lived in a working farmhouse. Her father taught high school students at the Oxford Academy. When she was in the fifth grade, her family moved to
Syracuse, New York, where her father entered graduate school and then taught as a professor of romance languages at
Le Moyne College. She attended the Edward Smith Elementary school, T. Aaron Levy Junior High and William Nottingham High School.
By all accounts, she was an excellent student at Nottingham High, devoted to her work. She spent her Saturdays in the Carnegie Library, absorbed in books and manuscripts. Carmelia Metosh was her
Latin teacher for three years, and in 1992 recalled: "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made , she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now. She was very alert, 'with it' in every way." Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgements to
Sexual Personae, and later described her as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards."
During the summers, she went to
Spruce Ridge Camp, a
Girl Scout facility in the
Adirondacks where, she later said, she had crushes on all the female counselors. She took different names when she was there, including Anastasia , Stacy, and Stanley. In one formative experience, she exploded the outhouse by pouring in too much lime. She said, "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..."
The year 1963 was the beginning of her career as a feminist scholar. For her birthday that year, she received a copy of
Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex from a Belgian colleague of her father's, Josphina van Hal McGinn. The book had a tremendous influence on her and furthered her resolve to be an important feminist writer. On July 8 of that year,
Newsweek is a weekly newsmagazine [i] published in New York City [i] and distributed throughout the ...
magazine published her letter about equal opportunity for American women. And on November 24, she appeared in Syracuse's
Herald American in a short profile about her outstanding achievements as a student, noting her longtime study of feminist icon
Amelia Earhart.
Paglia had been writing a book about Earhart, spending three years gathering materials and writing nearly 300 letters of inquiry to do so. She said, "I spent every Saturday in the bowels of the public library going through all these materials, old magazines and newspapers, before microfilm. Everything was falling to pieces. I probably destroyed the whole collection! I was covered with grime." But after reading
The Second Sex she resolved to write a "mega-book that will take everything in", and stopped writing about Earhart. It was then that she began
"Sexual Personae".
College years
Binghamton University, Harpur College
She started attending
Binghamton University, called Harpur College in 1964, and graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1968. The essays she wrote during those years, on questions of "sexual ambiguity and aggression in literature, art, and history" formed the first beginnings of
"Sexual Personae".
It was at Harpur, she later wrote, that she received her real education in poetry. There she took courses in Metaphysical poetry and
John Milton from Arthur L. Clements, an expert in 17th century literature. But the biggest impact on her thinking occurred in the classes of poet Milton Kessler, who had studied under Theodore Roethke. "He believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature," she has said. "And oh did I believe in that. Probably from my Italian background — that’s the way we respond to things, with our body. From
Michelangelo,
Bernini, there’s this whole florid physicality leading right down to the Grand Opera, the great arias."
She wrote her senior thesis on
Emily Dickinson, and aspired to be a poet herself, inspired by the work of
Edna St. Vincent Millay and
Gerard Manley Hopkins. She submitted a reconfiguration of the
Dido episode of
Virgil's
Aeneid to the college literary magazine, but its editor,
Deborah Tannen rejected it, saying that "Poets don't write like this anymore."
While at college she became friendly with Bruce Benderson , Stephen Jarratt and Stephen Feld, three gay men who would have a big influence on her. During a summer break, her father got her a job working the night shift at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse as a secretary in the emergency ward. "It was unbelievable, like being in a war without any danger to myself," she later said. "I forced myself to look at every single horrible thing - once, OK? After a while, you start to adjust. It was pivotal because it's one of the reasons I'm not sentimental at all about death or disease."
At college, she did not fit the typical gender roles. When she was 19, she hit a young drunken stranger in the teeth with her right fist in order to protect a small student whom he and a friend were groping on the street. One semester she was put on probation for committing 39 pranks, a fact that she has been proud to share. She told an interviewer in 2003 that she follows the model of the "
Hindu gurus, the aging masters and sages" because they're "Actually very funny. They're funny, they're prankish.
Zen masters are known to be prankish." She said, "To me, comedy is a symptom of a balanced perspective on life, and people who are going around, like gloomy gusses, in that Sontag style of intellectual, these people are suffering from something coming from their childhood, it has nothing to do with the proper intellectual response to life..."
Yale Graduate School
She next went on to Yale Graduate School, just as the women's movement and gay liberation exploded into American consciousness, yet Paglia found conflict at the university due to her sexual orientation and sexually ambiguous persona. A friend of hers at the time, Robert Caserio, recalled in 1996:
- "She did not act in a way that convention there dictated. Yale was an extremely genteel place. Camille wasn't genteel. She was so upfront and she wore pants in a very aggressive way. She was an out-feminist and identified with gay sexuality. We were all very much more discreet."
Just a few months after beginning her studies she attended a party in the home of R. W. B. Lewis, one of her teachers, and ended up being insulted by a prominent Yale psychiatrist named Robert Jay Lifton and his wife for being a lesbian. Lifton, at that time, was the Foundations' Fund Research Professor in Psychiatry at Yale, a position he held until 1984. His attack seems to have emboldened her not only to be out as a lesbian, but to be in everyone's face about it. She has repeatedly noted she was publicly out as a lesbian at
Yale Graduate School, and was actually the only open lesbian there from 1968 to 1972.
While studying at Yale, Paglia quarreled with
Rita Mae Brown, whom she later characterised as "then darkly nihilist", and fought with the
New Haven, Connecticut Women's Liberation Rock Band because they dismissed the
Rolling Stones as "sexist." She also "had two close encounters with Kate Millett just after she became famous, in
New Haven, Connecticut, and
Provincetown, Massachusetts, but she was too morosely self-absorbed to notice." Because of what she saw as Millett's "careless" attitude toward scholarship, Paglia became critical of her and those who supported her work.
Her study of sexuality in Western literature continued to develop with her reading of
D. H. Lawrence's
Women in Love is a novel [i] by British [i] author [i] D. H. Lawrence [i] ...
and
Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is an English epic poem [i] by Edmund Spenser [i], published first in ...
. In 1970, she wrote a 160-page paper for her last graduate seminar at Yale entitled "Male and Female in
Virginia Woolf." Her original projection for her book "Sexual Personae" was that it would end with her study of Woolf and Lawrence.
She discovered
Kenneth Clark's The Nude while browsing the shelves of Yale's Sterling Library in 1971, a book which would have a profound impact on her writing. "If ever I was in love with a book, it was with this one," she wrote in
Sex, Art & American Culture; and in an article for
Women's Quarterly in 2002, she called it "the best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art." The book influenced her writing in her Yale dissertation and subsequent works.
In 1971 she received a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Yale, and began looking for a teaching job. In May 1972 she was hired by Bennington College, thanks to a recommendation by
Harold Bloom. In the meantime, she continued to work on her Ph.D dissertation, which at this point was being written under the title of "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." Bloom, her mentor and adviser, found one fault in the draft he read in 1971. He cautioned in the margin that one passage was "Mere Sontagisme!" Paglia later wrote, "It saddened me, but I knew Bloom was right.
Susan Sontag, who could have been
Jane Harrison's successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing."
In a letter dated February 13, 1972 to Carolyn Heilbrun at
Columbia University, Paglia asked for information about her forthcoming book on androgyny; Heilbrun responded with a letter saying that her book would not be able to deal with all available material on that subject. Asked about Paglia's inquiry several years later, Heilbrun did not remember receiving the letter. When "Toward a Recognition of Androgyny" came out, Paglia gave a thoroughly negative assessment of it in a review for the Summer 1973 issue of the journal the
Yale Review. "Heilbrun's book is so poorly researched that it may disgrace the subject in the eyes of serious scholars," she wrote. She noted that "the most distinguished commentators on androgyny are
Mircea Eliade and G. Wilson Knight"; and criticized Heilbrun for her reliance on the work of
Joseph Campbell, and for including "four flattering references" to Kate Millett while making "fifteen glib jibes" at
Sigmund Freud. The article showed that the reviewer was an expert on the history of sexual androgyne, but as it was the journal's policy for reviews to be published without attribution, few people knew that Paglia wrote it.
Teaching career
In the fall of 1972, she began her first semester teaching at
Bennington College. There she met James Fessenden, a philosophy instructor from Columbia University, who started teaching at the same time as Paglia. In January 1997, Mark W. Edmundson, now a professor at the University of Virginia, recalled attending Bennington while Paglia was there:
- "She was appointed as my faculty advisor in her first term. I went in for my advisorial visit and she was entirely herself, talking very fast about many things I knew nothing about. I ran in fear. Alas, I was too puzzled to take any of her classes, which seemed to be full of very sophisticated people from LA and from New York."
Writer Heidi Schmidt, who attended her classes, recalled in 1996:
- "She was thought of as peculiar. She was so full of excitement and so intense. She would light one cigarette and then forget about it and light another, so she was waving two cigarettes. I think people took her quite lightly, she was thought of as eccentric."
Another student at Bennington while Paglia was there was Judith Butler, who went on to a very successful career in academe, a success that was not well deserved in Paglia's estimation. As she explained to one interviewer:
- "She was a student when I was at my first job at Bennington in the 70s, and I saw her up close. And I know what she knows. I mean, she transferred from there, to Yale, and her background in anything is absolutely minimal. She started a career in philosophy, abandoned that, and has been taken as this sort of major philosophical thinker by people in literary criticism. But has she ever made any exploration of science? For her to be dismissing biology, and to say gender is totally socially constructed — where are her readings, her studies? It’s all gameplay, wordplay, and her work is utterly pernicious, a total dead-end."
In 1973, she achieved her first scholarly publication. Originally a term paper for a class taught under Maynard Mack, who urged her to seek its publication, "Lord Hervey and
Pope," eventually appeared in the journal 18th Century Studies In April, she traveled to see Susan Sontag lecture at
Dartmouth College and later invited her to Bennington. Sontag spoke there on October 4th, an event that caused much controversy at the college since she read a short story instead of giving a cultural lecture, as she had agreed to. Paglia later commented, "I was stunned because I thought she was going to be a major intellectual," and then wrote about the meeting at length in a catty essay entitled "Sontag, Bloody Sontag," published in "Vamps & Tramps".
Another intellectual disappointment for Paglia was
Marija Gimbutas, who published
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe in 1974. At the same time, Paglia launched "a detailed attack on an exhibit at Bennington's Crossett Library, 'Matriarchy: The Golden Age,' which used appallingly shoddy feminist materials alleging the existence of a peaceful, prehistoric matriarchy, later supposedly overthrown by nasty males."
Through her study of the classics and her reading of the scholarship of
Jane Ellen Harrison,
James George Frazer, Erich Neumann and others, Paglia had developed a theory of sexual history that was in opposition to the ideas in vogue at the time, which is why she was so critical of Gimbutas, Heilbrun, Millet and others. She laid out her ideas on matriarchy, androgyny, homosexuality, sadomasochism and many other topics in her dissertation
Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, which she completed in December 1974, at the age of 27. She gave a public lecture drawing from material in the dissertation at Bennington College in September 1976, where she discussed
Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene, followed by remarks on Diana Ross,
Gracie Allen,
Yul Brynner, and
Stephane Audran.
In March of 1975, she drove from Vermont to
Albany to see
Germaine Greer speak. She was disappointed, reporting later that "During the question period, I nervously raised my hand from the crowd and asked if Greer, a former English professor, would be writing on literary subjects again soon. Her reply was stern and swift: 'There are far more important things in the world than literature!'"
Another time at Albany, 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. These women attributed my respect for science to 'brainwashing' by men." Similar sorts of fights with feminists, lesbians, chauvinists, homophobes, and academics would continue for years, reaching a high point in an event in 1978 which led to her resignation from Bennington a year later.
In the early 1980s, Paglia finished her book but couldn't get published and was supporting herself with visiting and part-time teaching jobs at Yale, Wesleyan, and other Connecticut colleges. She taught night classes at the Sikorsky Helicopter plant. 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 aside from that, not much was happening with her academic career at a time when her peers were moving on to important positions at major universities. In a letter of March 1993 to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a New Haven alternative newspaper in the early 1980s. There was an article on the historic pizzerias of the town and also one on an old house that was a stop on the
Underground Railroad."
She got a teaching job at the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts in 1984, which merged with its next-door neighbor, the Philadelphia College of Art, to become the University of the Arts in 1987. She took some time off to visit Europe, and while in Germany noted that "The women, stern-faced, melt the submissive heart...All look like
Lotte Lenya!"
Works
Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art
This is the dissertation she presented to the Graduate School of Yale University in candidacy for her Ph.D in December 1974, and which formed the basis for her 1990 book by the same name. The 451 page study, broken up into four chapters, examined the appearance of sexually ambiguous figures in art and literature from classical antiquity to the modern period. She wrote that her thesis was based on the assumption that "the inner dynamic of all artistic creation is a psychic union between masculine and feminine powers." She described her method as interdisciplinary, as it combined "literary criticism, art history, and psychology in what I believe is a new synthesis."
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
The two-volume manuscript of
Sexual Personae was completed in February 1981 and then rejected by seven publishers and five agents throughout the 1980s before its final acceptance by Ellen Graham for
Yale University Press in 1985. For the next few years, she continued to teach while perfecting volume one of the book for its eventual publication in February 1990, and releasing a few additional portions of it in other journals and books.
Her paper "
Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene" was published in 1988 in
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is a classic comedy of manners [i] by Oscar Wilde [i]. ...
, edited by Bloom; '"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art", was published in 1988 in
Western Humanities Review; and "Sex," was published in the
Spenser Encyclopedia by A. C. Hamilton in 1989.
After the release of
Sexual Personae on February 15, 1990, the book received little publicity from its publisher, as was typical of university presses at the time, but it sold well for months, prompting Yale University Press to send it into a second printing by November 1990. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award that year, and then reprinted in paperback by Vintage Press in 1991. It became a best-seller, as did her subsequent books
Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays and
Vamps and Tramps .
In
Sexual Personae, and in subsequent media statements and campus appearances throughout the early 1990s, Paglia aroused controversy by making statements against leaders of the American feminist movement, claiming they were ignorant of art, science, and history, that they were hostile to men, and doing harm to young women by teaching them to see themselves as nothing but victims. Her views on issues such as date rape, pornography, gay rights, and educational reform mostly angered people on the political left, who accused her of such things as misogyny,
homophobia and
neoconservatism. A selection of her articles, lectures and other writings from this period appeared in her next book,
Sex, Art, and American Culture.
Throughout the 1990s, she said that a second volume to
Sexual Personae would be forthcoming, this volume was also to have included her thoughts on sports and popular culture. Eventually, she decided not to proceed with the book, as it would need to undergo so many revisions, reflecting her changing attitude towards popular culture.
Sex, Art, and American Culture
Whereas the 24 chapters of
Sexual Personae looked at the study of decadence in art and culture from
Egyptian history to the late
19th century,
Sex, Art, and American Culture , exposed readers to Paglia's views on contemporary figures such as Madonna ,
Elizabeth Taylor,
Robert Mapplethorpe, and
Anita Hill.
Two chapters of the book were devoted to date rape, which the author said contemporary feminists had been incapable of preventing. "Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in civilized society," she wrote, "Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for
rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them."
Her controversial piece on Madonna, which was originally published in the "New York Times" in 1990, would be the first of several articles, reviews and other commentary about her for years to come. Paglia captured Madonna's attention, but not in a positive way. When "Esquire" magazine and the HBO cable network tried to arrange for Paglia to interview her, Madonna refused. In 1996, Madonna told an interviewer in Brazil that "I think she was upset because I wouldn't do an interview with her... Unhappy people can be nasty people."
Vamps and Tramps
Her next book, also an essay collection, was titled
Vamps and Tramps. This book collected all of her writings since her previous essay collection, and the critical response, which was mixed, tended to be that she had written too much on too wide a variety of topics. It included a theoretical manifesto about sex, "No Law in the Arena". It also included transcripts of her TV and film appearances of the previous years, including her 1993 collaboration with Glenn Belverio in his short film
"Glennda and Camille Do Downtown," which played at the
Sundance Film Festival and won first prize for best short documentary at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
The book was a bestseller and exposed a wide readership to her scathing views on contemporary matters such as
feminism, academia, the
Clinton presidency, the life of
Jacqueline Kennedy, and the career of
Barbra Streisand. Paglia explains her title thusly:
"I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment...Equal opportunity feminism, which I expouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic."
The Birds
In 1998 her fourth book was published, its subject a single film:
Alfred Hitchcock's
The Birds. She wrote it for the
British Film Institute's "Film Classics Series".
Basic Instinct commentary track
In 2001, Paglia recorded a commentary track for the DVD of one of her favorite films,
Basic Instinct is an American [i] erotic [i] mystery film [i] directed [i] ...
. She speaks about the idea that society has destroyed the tension between the sexes, which Paglia says
Basic Instinct captures perfectly. "Today, the ideal male is the gay man," she says, "and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men."
In analyzing what she calls "the strange sexual world of Basic Inctinct" she notes that "Sharon Stone's performance as the vamp, Catherine Tramell, is in the mainline of
femme fatale portrayals in old Hollywood from
Theda Bara and
Marlene Dietrich on." She praises almost everything about the film, even the credits and score, which she says are an "homage to Alfred Hitchcock, one of the master directors of the 20th century, and the one who first fused gory crime drama with scintillating, titillating, sexual intrigue and glamour." The lyrical music by
Jerry Goldsmith "seems to record mystery, ambiguity, sexual pursuit of female by male, and then the stalking of male by female."
Break, Blow, Burn
In 2005 her study of poetry, entitled
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems was published. The book contains full texts of the 43 poems, each followed by an essay. The title is from a line in "Holy Sonnet XIV" by
John Donne. It was named as one of the "New York Times Notable Books of the Year" for 2005, and was on the bestseller's list for Amazon.com,
Booksense,
The New York Times, The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association", and
Toronto Globe & Mail.
In this book, she wrote a chapter on each of the following poems:
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
- William Shakespeare, The Ghost's Speech from Hamlet is a tragedy [i] by William Shakespeare [i] and is one of h ...
- John Donne, The Flea
- John Donne, Holy Sonnet I
- John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV
- George Herbert, Church-Monuments
- George Herbert, The Quip
- George Herbert, Love
- Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
- William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper
- William Blake, London
- William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much With Us
- William Wordsworth, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
- Walt Whitman
...
,
Song Of Myself
Because I Could Not Stop For Death
Emily Dickinson, Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers
Emily Dickinson, The Soul Selects Her Own Society
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan Wallace Stevens, Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams, This Is Just To Say Jean Toomer, Georgia Dusk
Langston Hughes, Jazzonia
Theodore Roethke, Cuttings
Theodore Roethke, Root Cellar
Theodore Roethke, The Visitant
Robert Lowell, Man and Wife
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
Frank O'Hara, A Mexican Guitar
Paul Blackburn, The Once-Over
May Swenson, At East River
Gary Snyder, Old Pond
Norman H. Russell, The Tornado
Chuck Wachtel, A Paragraph
Rochell Kraut, My Makeup
Wanda Coleman, Wanda Why Aren't You Dead
Ralph Pomeroy, Corner Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
While speaking at events during the 2006 promotional tour for the paperback version of her book, she attacked the positive reputations that poets
John Ashberry and Jorie Graham have enjoyed in academe. Of Graham she said, "Maybe she had some talent early on... She is like a mirror to the professors; they look into her and see themselves."
She also spoke of how badly she felt for not including any poems by
Allen Ginsberg in the book, since she was a fan of his since reading "
Howl". She said that she tried to excerpt the first hundred lines of "Howl", but that it gave the wrong impression of the work. The poem also did not entirely meet her standards. As she told a reporter for the "Toronto Star": "
Howl, when I reread it, came across as so garish, stagey, hammy. It didn't work for this book."
She also considered including Ginsberg's "The Blue Angel" , which begins with the line,
"Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament for mechanical love." As she said to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 2006, it's "an early poem that was not well known," and is "oddly conventional in its format." She said "it's about Marlene Dietrich as a kind of
automaton, representing a robotic woman. And I thought this is really interesting, in sort of sexual terms about media, et cetera. But I refrained from doing it because I thought, well, people will just say I put it in because it's about a Hollywood star. And you know — probably I would, probably it's true! I mean, probably Marlene Dietrich means much more to me than it would to the general readership."
Another Ginsberg poem she said she admires is "America" . In 2005 she told an audience in San Francisco's
Haight Ashbury district that this poem, which includes the line
"I'm addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine is a weekly American [i] newsmagazine [i], similar to
Newsweek [i] and U.S. News & World Report [i] ...
?" is a rare example of quality writing about the media, which goes "from Ginsberg to Chuck Wachtel with a lot of crap in between." Her reference to Chuck Wachtel specifically concerned his poem "A Paragraph", which is featured in
Break, Blow, Burn. Ginsburg's "A Supermarket in California" was also considered too long for inclusion.
She wanted to include a poem by a friend of hers from Yale, Mark Strand, but she decided that her selection simply did not belong in a book that included Yeats's "The Second Coming."
Influences on Paglia's work
Scholars, critics and other writers whose work has strongly influenced Paglia's thought include:
...
...
The name Freud is generally pronounced [i] [] in English [i] and [] in German [i] ...
...
Criticism of Paglia
Paglia has over the years been a controversial figure and attracted most of her media exposure through public rows with, amongst others, The Modern Review and an early exit from an
ITV News interview.
References and footnotes
Bibliography
- Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art
- Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
- Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays
- Vamps and Tramps: New Essays ISBN 0-679-75120-3
- The Birds
- Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems ISBN 0-375-42084-3
News articles
Articles by Paglia
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- article by Paglia
- article by Paglia
- article by Paglia
