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Umetnost i dekadencija od Kraljice Nefertiti do Emili Dikenson
Аутор - особа Paglia, Camille
Наслов Sexual Personae : art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson / Camille Paglia
Врста грађе књига
Језик енглески
Година 1990
Издавање и производња New Haven : Yale University Press, 1990
Физички опис XIV, 718 str. : ilustr. ; 25 cm
ISBN 0-300-04396-1
Напомене Notes: str. 675-700.
Предметне одреднице Америчка књижевност -- 19в
УДК 820(73)(091)"18"
COBISS.SR-ID 85500428

Seks, umetnost i američka kultura ogledi
autor
Kamila Palja
Sadržaj:
Uvod.
Madona I: Animalnost i umeće.
Madona II: Venera radio talasa.
Elizabet Tejlor: holivudska paganska kraljica.
Rokenrol kao umetnost.
Homoseksualnost i Fin de Siecle.
Radosti prezbiterijanskog seksa.
Prelepa dekadencija Roberta Mejpltorpa.
Neobičan slučaj Klarensa Tomasa i Anite Hil.
Silovanje i savremeni rat polova.
Rasprava o silovanju i dalje traje.
Kleopatra na cedilu.
Alisa u zemlji mišića.
Graciozna lakoća kritike.
Veliko vime.
Brando - blesak munje.
Kakva gnjavaža!
Seksualne persone: neobjavljeni predgovor.
Milton Kesler: sećanje.
Multikulturni ogled.
Lažne obveznice i preuzimanje kompanija: akademski krugovi u noći vukova.
Kriza na američkim univerzitetima.
Dodatak.
ISBN 86-7494-037-4
OPIS KNJIGE:
"Seks, umetnost i američka kultura“ predstavlja zbirku tekstova, objavljivanih u američkoj štampi krajem 1990. i tokom 1991. godine, kojima je Camille Paglia skrenula pažnju medijske javnosti na svoju prvu knjigu „Seksualne persone: Umetnost i dekadencija od Nefretete do Emili Dikinson“, dovršenu 1981. a objavljenu tek početkom 1990. godine. Osnovne postavke svog teorijskog sistema, temeljno argumentovane u „Seksualnim personama“, koje obuhvataju vreme od preistorije do kraja devetnaestog veka, Paglia primenjuje i u tumačenju popularne kulture i savremenih fenomena američkog društva

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.[1] The book became a bestseller,[2] and was praised by numerous literary critics, although it also received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars.

Background
It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone.

– Camille Paglia[3]

Paglia's discovery of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1963 inspired her to write a book larger in scope. Sexual Personae began to take shape in essays Paglia wrote in college between 1964 and 1968. The title was inspired by Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, which Paglia saw on its American release in 1968. The book was finished in 1981, but was rejected by seven major New York publishers before being released by Yale University Press in 1990. Paglia credits editor Ellen Graham with securing Yale's decision to publish the book. Sexual Personae's original preface was removed at the Yale editors' suggestion because of the book's extreme length, but was later published in Paglia's essay collection Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992).[4]

Paglia describes Sexual Personae's method as psychoanalytic and acknowledges a debt to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Her other major influences were Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920), Sándor Ferenczi's Thalassa (1924), the works of literary critics G. Wilson Knight and Harold Bloom, Erich Neumann's The Great Mother (1955) and The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), Kenneth Clark's The Nude (1956), Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1958), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959) and Love's Body (1966), and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). Paglia also acknowledges astrology as an influence.[4]

Paglia said of the book, "It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity."[5]

Summary

The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism (1868) by Gustave Doré. In Sexual Personae, Paglia argues that Christianity never did defeat paganism.[6]
Paglia seeks to demonstrate "the unity and continuity of western culture". Accepting the canonical Western tradition, she "rejects the modernist idea that culture has collapsed into meaningless fragments." Paglia argues that Christianity did not destroy paganism, which flourishes in art, eroticism, astrology, and popular culture. She examines antiquity, the Renaissance, and Romanticism from the late eighteenth century to 1900, contending that "Romanticism turns almost immediately into Decadence." She believes that the "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics" and that sex and nature are "brutal pagan forces." She also stresses the truth in sexual stereotypes and the biological basis of sexual difference, noting that her stance is "sure to cause controversy." Paglia sees the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they fleetingly escape through rationalism and physical achievement.[7]

Portraying Western culture as a struggle between phallic sky-religion ("Sky Cult") on the one hand and chthonic earth-religion ("Earth Cult") on the other, Paglia draws on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian. She associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. She analyzes literature and art on the premise that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these forces. In her view, the major patterns of continuity in Western culture originate in paganism. Other sources of continuity include androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive "western eye," which seeks to refine and dominate nature's ceaseless hostility and has created our art and cinema. Paglia criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the causes of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes.[8]

She prominently argues for the vital role that patriarchy has played in civilizational development, even noting that "Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny."[9] In one of her most infamous passages, she grounds this claim in what effectively amounts to the variability hypothesis in evolutionary psychology:

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.[10]

But already more conflicted in tone, another one of her main explanations for this asymmetry instead runs:

Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. [emphasis added] [...] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species.[11]

The "sexual personae" of Paglia's title include the female vampire (Medusa, Lauren Bacall); the pythoness (the Delphic Oracle, Gracie Allen); the beautiful boy (Hadrian's Antinous, Dorian Gray); the epicene man of beauty (Byron, Elvis Presley); and the male heroine (the passive male sufferer; for example, the old men in William Wordsworth's poetry).[12] Writers Paglia discusses include Spenser, Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Marquis de Sade, Goethe, William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Emily Dickinson. The works of literature Paglia analyzes include Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Byron's Don Juan, Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray.[13]

Works of art to which Paglia applies her analysis of the Western canon include the Venus of Willendorf, the Nefertiti Bust, Ancient Greek sculpture, Donatello's David, Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera, da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.[12] Paglia questions the sociologist Max Weber's definition of charisma, according to which it must be manifested in heroic deeds or miracles, writing that she sees charisma as "the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality" and "the radiance produced by