Camille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia (/ˈpɑːliə/; born April 2, 1947) is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984. She wrote Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a best-selling work of literary criticism, among other books and essays. She also wrote an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and Break, Blow, Burn on poetry. She writes articles on art, popular culture, feminism, and politics. Paglia has celebrated Madonna and taken radical libertarian positions on controversial social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and drug use. She is known as a critic of American feminism, and is also strongly critical of the influence of French writers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
Read more about Camille Paglia: Overview, Personal Life, Education, Career, Works
Famous quotes by camille paglia:
“In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description.... Criticism is ceremonial revivification.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I have a dream: in my dream ... Aretha Franklin, in her fabulous black-lipstick ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ outfit, leaps from her seat at Maxim’s and, shouting ‘Think!,’ blasts Lacan, Derrida and Foucault like dishrags against the wall, then leads thousands of freed academic white slaves in a victory parade down the Champs-Elysées.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones ... run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation’s egalitarianism was a sentimental error.... I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)