Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

A great insight into that world.

Good quality paperback, good service. Arrived sooner the expected.

This is now a classic in feminist art studies and philosophy. Readers in this field will know that Paglia's work can be polarizing. Camille Paglia and Donna Haraway--though substantially different from each other--wrote major tomes at the same time which affected the trajectory of feminist studies for the next two decades causing a proverbial divergence in the field. Fascinating writers and speakers, they are erudite and original. Paglia's first major book pushed boundaries and fomented interdisciplinary discussions and debates. This book is not for a general audience, though I think it might be a good idea for general readers to challenge their assumptions by reading a chapter or two and then coming back to it to see if their point of view has changed. Parts of the book read as if they are slightly dated from a different time while other parts read as if they could have been written this week. It's still relevant, and either way it prompts thinking. Some paragraphs can be lengthy and dense and may require a couple reads. Recommend this book (at least several chapters of it) for graduate seminars and upper division undergraduate courses.

I somehow managed to make it through post-grad studies in English without being exposed to Paglia's writing, and wish I had read her much sooner. While I find myself at odds with some of her propositions in this book (and in whole agreement with others), her writing style alone makes this worth reading, as it's nearly as fascinating as the ideas she's putting forth. Her voice manages to be both highbrow and egalitarian simultaneously—dense, but still strangely accessible. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with her, it is difficult to stop reading.As the book progresses, Paglia evocatively guides her audience through a pointed tour of art and sexuality, tracking it from pre-modern history through the 20th century. Her thesis, when reduced to its base elements, is that art and human sexuality are inextricable, and she makes persuasive arguments for her positions.If for no other reason, "Sexual Personae" is worth reading on the grounds of its brilliant distillation of art history—but Paglia's incisive commentary that undergirds it adds new dimensions that are worth thinking about.

This is an erudite read which made quite a splash when it first came out. I felt that I had been out of the loop, so thought I would try and see what all the fuss is about. I am still plodding though it and taking brief rests along the way. You can skip around different chapters with no penalty of understanding. I believe the content was considered shocking for its time, but not for our present time.

Far-reaching and enlightening. Think about what feminism (especially on college campuses) has today become----in my English class, literally when analyzing Yeats' 'Leda and Swan' one looking-serious female student made a yet dumb, self-righteous point of negating/denying/bashing Zeus as part of a "rape culture" and further wondering if God asked Mary for consent to Annunciation and begetting Jesus...CUT IT OUT. If this is the product of today's feminism, I am willing to sign out from such misled 'club'. It begins to miss, dismiss, undermine, fracture, with its often easy-to-pick-up flawed arguments here and there, a consistent civilization/society having developed since ancient times.

If you ave not read Camille Paglia, you should. She is a deep thinker. Rush Limbaugh liked her too. :)

I am not an academic in the field of literature and art although I do possess a doctorate in psychology. I bought the book as it's so famous, even Bowie listed it as a favorite. For a start, it's not an easy book.I also felt the author wrote in the kind of jargony way that is overutilized in academia, which rendered arguments in places impossible to understand. Her main thesis is the struggle between sky-cults, or Apollonian perspectives, associated with modern technology, the arts, progress, order, hierarchy, typically male it seems as, if I understood it correctly, these derived from an ability to silence to some extent the Dyonisian, earth-cult, called chthonian, associated with biology, nature, the passions, always trying to pull us down or apart. Superficially such a model resembles cognitive theory, a la Daniel Kahneman (System 1 and 2), but with Paglia the attempt is to forge a more psychoanalytic tension of deepest drives, which is argued has guided the evolution of painting, sculpture, poetry, cinema, music and fiction, and presumably all civilization.One of my biggest problems with the book is how lots of examples of decadence and Eros are alligned with the Apollonian when one would think they would be with the Dyonisian. Paglia's thesis therefore seems a matter of choosing for no compelling reason which force is the predominant in each example, which weakens the central argument.Paglia also jumps so frequently into rival examples that one must read a furious attempt to make a point, rather than to carefully argue it for the reader. Paglia is brilliant, but her mind could also use a little time to organize her thoughts and how to express them.Forgetting that psychoanalysis is today considered a pseudoscience, there is validity (I've experienced it myself in my psychology training) in hypothesizing psychoanytic factors when conceptualizing a person, as a means of trying to understand a personality, but today we recognize that conceptualizing dimensions or aspects of people is not to be confused with fully capturing them, as people are more complex. People (brains) also have meaning systems unique to them, which must be captured in attempts to understand them. The meaning-making universe described by Paglia is obviously not that of the actual artists involved, which simplifies her model, rendering it excessively deterministic and black and white, which gets boring the more you find it applied to every artist under consideration. But that doesn't mean she hasn't captured an important idea in every paragraph.You are going to feel more lost when she puts to analysis dozens of writers you ashamedly had not yet read, which was the case with me. But the reading also motivated me to improve in my exposure to, and engagement with, those artists, which is a good thing.People are also products of culture. They are existentially thrown into slave, feudal or capitalist societies in which they wrestle with the beliefs of their time, and not only their biological make-up. Many of the struggles artists or people faced may be viewed as somewhat culture-bound, even if they never realized it. Without understanding that context, one might assume the struggle to be part of life, part of biology, as Paglia does. And I say that without denying we experience conflicts made of sexual forces, identities, roles, even deep-seated urges to consume, rule, die, destroy.In my view the book belongs to such similar attempts to paint human history with a broad brush, some of the best being Total Man by Stan Gooch, The Origin of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes, The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, and Paglia's thesis, though often unsatisfying, is very original and insightful in her way, and I would say worth reading, though skeptically, as should be the case with any reading.I can imagine myself delving into the tomes she discussed, then peeking back into her work to see what she said about them, although having read many of the works she does discuss, I am not entirely convinced her views will always help me understand them.

Camille Paglia is the brilliant voice that we all must hear!

Welp, Paglia - as a second-wave feminist - has now been disavowed (and virtually canceled) by the third and fourth wavers (in much the same way as Christina Hoff-Somers, Erin Pizzey, and Gloria Steinem); this makes it all the more important to get hold of her works while one can - before they are consigned to the memory hole. This is a fairly heavy, and critical, examination but is easily accessible to the moderately intelligent.

Excelentes conceptos de una interesante y polémica autora

One of the best essays I've ever read, hugely informative and beautifully written.

An astonishing tour de force written by an old-school feminist, with a brand new point of view. The book turns today's university impregnated absurdities on their head. For example, Paglia is not afraid to say that biology, and gender accompany one another - there are real vaginas and real penises and these are associated directly with the myth systems behind many of our current problems. One of her startling ideas is that pornography carries the primal fantasies of the race, fantasies which are to all intents and purposes immediately biological. Even more startling, Paglia dismisses any claim which relativises notions such as 'male domination hierarchy', claiming these have been a part of our history since time began.