Opis: Camille Paglia is on the warpath again, advocating a "re"vamped" feminism" that rediscovers "the demonic impulses of Dionysian night." An occasional walk on the wild side doesn't sound all that radical, but along the way Paglia plans to rescue the progressive principles of the sixties from the "brackish bog of political correctness into which they have sunk." Them's fighting words in the ears of the feminist establishment, for whom Paglia's voice sounds like fingernails screeching across a blackboard. Readers of Paglia's landmark study "Sexual Personae" (1990) and her first collection of essays, "Sex, Art, and American Culture" (1992), won't find much new ground broken in this second collection, but it does offer a stimulating overview of Paglia's own personaes: the street fighter, throwing insults at rival Susan Sontag with the ferocity of Muhummad Ali cutting down Floyd Patterson, who, like Sontag, symbolized an earlier era; the outrageous personality, touring lower Manhattan with drag queen Glenda Orgasm or declaiming on British TV about the "Year of the Penis"; the cultural commentator, equally adept at rescuing D. H. Lawrence from "moralistic text-bashers" and finding in Jackie Kennedy's appeal a version of dressage, the English art of horsemanship.Finally, though, all of these personaes are window dressing for the real Paglia--the thinker, the synthesizer of ideas, the intellectual adventurer in search of a general theory of culture. This Paglia, the one that really matters, is on display here in the collection's centerpiece, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality," in which she tackles the whole messy question of sex in the troubled nineties. Her libertarian position, advocating an absolute separation of public and private spheres, is likely to offend almost everyone, especially fundamentalists, party-line feminists, and gay activists, but the essay offers an ideal showcase for her astounding mind, which ranges freely over centuries of art and learning, finding connections everywhere, marshaling evidence with all the finesse of a general deploying troops. Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown, Annie Oakley and Auntie Mame, even the now-despised Susan Sontag--Paglia draws from them all, using what she calls the "Mbius strip of the human psyche" to meld past and future. Did sedate, civilized E. M. Forster know when he advised us to "only connect" that he was opening the doors of learning to a steamrolling, campy diva dynamo like Camille Paglia? Probably not, but it's nice to think so.
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