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Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia Quotes

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Famous Camille Paglia Quotes

“Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.”

ThinkingWritingYearsFirstsBookDisciplineIntellectualEvidenceTraditionForgivingRateFeministScholarMasculineJaneSisterhoodGreat WomenClingy
Book:Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
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“The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought... Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.”

WorldArtReasonProblemTodayTermNumbersCenturyStudentsArt IsTraditionCriticismDepthAncientIgnorantPrimariesProfessorsWorld HistoryTheoreticalExpertiseDistortionNineteenth CenturyAcademiaSophisticationBreadthInterconnectedDullnessIneptitude
Author:Camille Paglia
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“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.”

FormLawEnergyLinesVictoryCivilizationTraditionDignitySafetyMadWestStriveBoundariesOppressionDestructiveCustomsTyrantsConventionsRudeApolloConstraintsSweepingExhilaratingBegin AgainCallousDionysusUnboundVandals
Book:Sexual Personae
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“French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.”

PersonsUniverseSpeakBehindsIntellectualModelsTraditionNotionAffectedAggressiveConcreteImportsPerniciousRhetorical
Book:Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
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“We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.”

IfsWorldArtImportantIdeasTermWhiteGreatnessCivilizationTraditionExcellenceMalesRateTricksDefinedArtisticDistinctionDeniedGreat ArtElitistSecond Rate
Book:Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
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“It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.”

IdeasEuropeTraditionRecoveryBrownSubstitutesThinkerLinkedTransfersAmerican TraditionLacanDerridaLeslieTriads
Author:Camille Paglia
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