Camille Paglia
Camille (Anna) Paglia (born April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York) is a social critic, author and avowed feminist. She is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Paglia is an intellectual of many apparent contradictions: a classicist who champions art both high and low, with a Hobbesian view that human nature is inherently dangerous, and yet who also celebrates dionysian revelry in the wilder, darker sides of human sexuality.
Paglia came to attention with the publication of her first book, "Sexual Personae", in 1990, when she also began writing about popular culture and feminism in mainstream newspapers and magazines. In early 1991, she was the subject of a New York magazine cover story, "Woman Warrior". She reached the height of her fame in 1992 with the publication of Sex, Art and American Culture, which was much read on college campuses. Her next book, Vamps and Tramps (late 1994), was a collection of short pieces along and new material such as a theoretical manifesto about sex, "No Law in the Arena". In 1998 she published a short volume about Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" in the British Film Institute Film Classics series.
She is currently writing a third essay collection for Vintage Books, and in 2005 Pantheon Books will publish her study of poetry, entitled Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems. The title is from a line of poetry by John Donne.
Paglia was a columnist for Salon.com for six years from its first issue and is now a contributing editor at Interview magazine. She continues to write articles and reviews for media and scholarly journals, such as her long article, "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s", published in the classics and humanities journal Arion in Winter 2003.
Her significance in the 1990s intellectual world was two-fold:
- The seventies had seen the rise of a particularly rigid, doctrinaire "feminism" that many were finding stifling but only a few were challenging (e.g., the "sex positive" S/M lesbians, perhaps typified by Susie Bright).
- The left was pushing for a change in the traditional focus of western universities on western culture (sometimes derided as the study of "dead white males"). For example, Stanford University was dropping its well-regarded undergraduate requirement of a year-long course in "Western Culture" in favor of a more broadly-focused study of "Cultures Ideas and Values" or CIV.
Against this backdrop, Camille Paglia appeared on the scene as a female intellectual who enjoyed challenging the left-wing position in these areas, but far from being the usual stodgy conservative, she did so by
arguing from an unusual, flashy position that also embraced homosexuality, fetish, and prostitution. She describes herself as a "libertarian," as she speaks out in favor of individual freedom, which may help explain the apparent contradiction, and the consternation she causes in crossing back and forth between the dominant political camps. She is also an atheist, though she thinks comparative religion should be at the center of world education.
Books
- Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art (Dissertation: 1974)
- Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
- Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992)
- Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (1994) ISBN 0679751203
- The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (1998)
- Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005) ISBN 0375420843
