Sex, Art, and American Culture
Thomas, Christopher
YOUR MBA FROM TEMPLETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY The Templeton MBA program, a 17-month program led by an internation- ally-recognized faculty, is designed for ministry professionals including ...
...The target for which she reserves her most potent venom is "academic feminism," which she thinks fascistic and glacial...
...True, as Procrustean beds go, the music and considers it an authentic art, a ideas of Freud and Nietzche fit better than contemporary manifestation of "the Ro- REVIEWERS most and are certainly more energizing and mantic archetypes of energy, passion, re- REV...
...Like women, we men are complex, and Lacan (her three arch-villains...
...several reviews of books, art exhibitions, and current events (Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill...
...She owes a vast intellectual debt she does not mean to overlook these (to but some are victims of terrible crimes...
...After cutting the books to ribbons, she launches into a forty-page afterword diagnosing the ills of American higher education which have encouraged such sloppy, trendy scholarship...
...But how can she rec- CHRISTOPHER THOMAS is assistant promodate reality well...
...Box N3732 Nassau, The Bahamas Or dial toll-free: 1-800-847-8921 NEITZSCHE...
...oncile that with her concerns for cultural fessor of art histon- at the University of Victoria In particular I find her obsession with quality, continuity, and resonance...
...Here we can expect to find evidence of the wine god's work aplenty...
...Paglia came to public notice in 1990 after her gigantic book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press) appeared...
...She emphasizes the savage and erotic-Nietzsche's "Dionisian"over the "Apollonian," or rational and orderly, and sees culture and life in society as requiring the wearing of masks (personae) to give disciplined expression to wild, libidinous human nature...
...MADONNA SEX, ART, AND AMERICAN CULTURE Essays Camille Paglia Vintage Books, $13, 337 pp...
...She has a real flair idence of the ancient, buried paganism of reality: sports, music, and theater (of all for acute description of personality types, Roman Catholicism...
...Packed in at the end is a section of cartoons and commentary about herself-an unusual appendix in an academic book...
...Her turbing and a bit frightening...
...Application deadline is August 30th...
...Its core is a long essay which began as a review of two books on a subject close to her heart, homosexuality in ancient Greece...
...Sex, Art, and American Culture is a collection of her miscellaneous writings produced since Sexual Personae...
...But why would "brawling, boozy bad boys...
...For example, she her stiletto heel is a literary type, but how sense of humor, is a triumph of Dioni- praises Robert Mapplethorpe, whose many prostitutes on the street tonight feel sianism...
...But her fixation on this makes her suspect she would find (as some feminists in Roman Catholicism...
...PHILIP J. MURNION is director of the liberating...
...shocking photographs of sexual pain and like her or have her power...
...Her style of presentation, more or less that of a stormtrooper in jackboots, has not always made it easy to hear her, and this book makes a valuable introduction to her ideas and opinions...
...26: 4 June 1993 Common weal...
...freshing contrast to the turgid, labyrinthine years ago, and calls him her "spiritual In short, the reader, while enjoying prose one meets too often in the human- brother...
...she would be disap- ing, political debate, and on and on...
...YOUR MBA FROM TEMPLETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY The Templeton MBA program, a 17-month program led by an internationally-recognized faculty, is designed for ministry professionals including clerical, religious and laity, and offers courses in: • Theology of Management • Business Ethics • Principles of Management • Corporate Culture • Marketing • Strategic Management • Finance for Not-for-Profits -Total Quality Management The multinational composition of the class promises students access to diverse ideas and an exciting learning experience...
...Mapplethorpe's aim, I think, be seen as theories too, not gospel...
...but they are Procrustean beds bellion, and demonism...
...The 17-month program consists of four one-week intensive study sessions with extramural directed readings and a management project...
...And to Nietzsche, the source of the Apollonian the contrary, I think), her emphasis falls the ancient archetype of the prostitute as and Dionisian categories in which she too often on sex, especially its darker, the scarlet woman who finds out men's puts so much stock, and her own persona, kinkier forms...
...This is valid, but...
...A hilarious pop version of the essay follows, in the form of a lecture she gave at MIT on "Crisis in the American Universities...
...While overprivileged, naive, and self-righteous, pointed...
...spiritu- we all operate from theories, and hers must American pragmatic empiricism...
...There have) that children have a way of breaksaints in churches and procession are "ev- are countless other avenues to nature and ing out of stereotypes...
...There are, besides, two pieces on date rape, a phenomenon she takes seriously but has little patience for (young women should learn to take care of themselves, she says...
...Li problem is that the theories that form her was precisely to make such brotherhood building-blocks have their drawbacks, impossible...
...her daring, must beware of being seduced...
...Commonweal 4 June 1993: 25 Christopher Thomas Ir wo years ago an obscure humanities professor in Philadelphia, Camille Paglia, burst on American higher education and the press like a bombshell, firing raucous, unconventional views in all directions-on feminism, popular culture, Madonna, human nature, date rape, and almost everything else...
...As big as it is, this is only the first of two volumes...
...Boys have a harder time growing up than girls, she says, because they must not only identify with the masculine but also leave the feminine, in the person of their mothers, behind...
...For her, sex changeful creatures, and while reading awareness of the role of nature owes, she is a path into the unevolved wildness of Paglia I kept wishing she had boys of her says, to having been raised in a big, feisty nature, Freud as rewritten by the Brothers own to raise to test against her theories...
...the second will treat her obsessions in twentieth-century popular culture, "cinema, television, sports, rock music...
...This, she says, has to do with Americans' subservience since about 1970 to fashionable her more bizarre ideas is to send rockers to art schools (like John Lennon) and give them NEA grants...
...storming from city to city" let themselves be co-opted that way...
...Among in Victoria, British Columbia...
...Some college darkened the doors of many Catholic is single), arguing, fighting, laughing, cry- women who are raped on dates are indeed churches lately...
...She cannot abide its version of history as a dank, oppressive blanket of "patriarchy," and, instead, extols male power and creativity, which she claims have built the world...
...Most feminists detest her, but she is one herself, though one for whom the term coined in the sixties, "women's liberationist," is more apt...
...Beneath her bluster Paglia is a woman of staggering learning and a fine writer, one who takes the craft seriously...
...This is High Noon in Dodge City, not luncheon at the National Gallery of Art...
...peal to North American scholars to end She urges us to see in Mapplethorpe's pho- She asks good questions, and her answers their affair with cynical, pessimistic cur- tos the latest chapter in the Western chron- are often refreshingly liberating...
...Similarly, she adores rock too...
...and brief essays on those sexual personae par excellence, Madonna and Liz Taylor...
...I Italian-American family and to her roots Grimm...
...The al brother...
...Parents, too, may have difficulty recognizing their children (and themselves) in her colorful, timeless archetypes...
...That is, she claims freedom and equality for women but does not hate men or blame them for all the evils in the world...
...The study sessions conducted in Nassau, Bahamas are held each May and November...
...Experience and psychological research tend to bear her out on this, but her image of men and boys as primitive, macho denizens of forest and sports bar-one, incidentally, not unlike that pushed by the men's movement-is a simplistic caricaFrench intellectuals like Foucault, Derrida, sexuality, especially sadomasochism, dis- ture...
...nonetheless and do not always accom- some rock myself...
...Images of martyred seem at times like a one-trick pony...
...Students will be accommodated in an international hotel in Nassau...
...The cackling patriarch of this Paglia's chutzpah and being challenged by ities today, and I warmly second her ap- strange family is the Marquis de Sade...
...Admission requirements are a bachelor's degree and five years in the ministry or equivalent...
...I wonder if she has kinds), vacations, raising children (Paglia but no one fits them exactly...
...Her bias rents in continental theory and philosophy icle of the mysterious, uncontrollable side against theory is a valuable corrective, but and return to the wellspring of Anglo- of sexuality...
...More deeply, she opposes the devaluation of nature by feminism and other recent intellectual movements that overestimate the power of culture...
...For a prospectus and application form write: TEMPLETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY P.O...
...This is quite a swath, and it reveals the mind of one who must lecture to undergraduates several times a week on anything and everything...
...Life conforms Paglia's heat and directness are in re- degradation raised such a ruckus three to art only in a measure...
...I confess I like National Pastoral Life Center...
...In Sexual Personae she argues that a definable set of archetypes, including the beautiful boy, the dandy, the mother goddess, and the vampire, recurs cyclically throughout the history of Western culture and gives it a coherent if raunchy pattern...
...This leads her to make weakness and crushes their gonads under with its quick, caustic judgment and zany questionable judgments...
Vol. 120 • June 1993 • No. 11
