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pinkmooon 's review for:
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
by Camille Paglia
Paglia is difficult to rate. I wouldn't say she's a 'love-it-or-hate-it' sort of author. That's too unequivocal.
I passed through various phases of being amused and being extremely bored by her. The latter won out - I skipped a few chapters on writers I want to read on my own first, and didn't feel like I was missing out terribly. Her terse declarative style is bold and interesting for almost 10 pages of reading her; then it grates.
She's good at making vague yet striking statements nestled between lots of self-evident and obvious ones. She's obviously indebted to Harold Bloom, and reminds me of a former classics lecturer who was similarly fond of making arguments through the method of supporting a provocative premise with dull truths that are only tangential, that serve mostly to make the initial provocation seem similarly obvious. That style of using one's own erudition above something as trite as secondary sources works well when one is entertaining. When one is not (and with 800 pages, that is common with Paglia) it is powerfully dull.
Paglia is certainly not obscurant in style, and is a passionate critic of that in academia, but her forthright declarative prose means that when she seems to be talking shit, she can't really hide it. She usually is. Maybe Lacan and Derrida usually are too, but I can't say so the same way I can say so about Paglia, because of the complexity in style.
Perhaps the stereotypical obscurantist is as much an inveterate bullshit artist as someone like Paglia -- who do we listen to then? It might just come down to style. At least there's something alluring in mystery. I find reading Lacan frustrating, but he isn't boring.
I passed through various phases of being amused and being extremely bored by her. The latter won out - I skipped a few chapters on writers I want to read on my own first, and didn't feel like I was missing out terribly. Her terse declarative style is bold and interesting for almost 10 pages of reading her; then it grates.
She's good at making vague yet striking statements nestled between lots of self-evident and obvious ones. She's obviously indebted to Harold Bloom, and reminds me of a former classics lecturer who was similarly fond of making arguments through the method of supporting a provocative premise with dull truths that are only tangential, that serve mostly to make the initial provocation seem similarly obvious. That style of using one's own erudition above something as trite as secondary sources works well when one is entertaining. When one is not (and with 800 pages, that is common with Paglia) it is powerfully dull.
Paglia is certainly not obscurant in style, and is a passionate critic of that in academia, but her forthright declarative prose means that when she seems to be talking shit, she can't really hide it. She usually is. Maybe Lacan and Derrida usually are too, but I can't say so the same way I can say so about Paglia, because of the complexity in style.
Perhaps the stereotypical obscurantist is as much an inveterate bullshit artist as someone like Paglia -- who do we listen to then? It might just come down to style. At least there's something alluring in mystery. I find reading Lacan frustrating, but he isn't boring.