Vamps & Tramps: New Essays

by Camille Paglia

Overview

The bestselling author of Sexual Personae and Sex, Art, and American Culture is back with a fiery new collection of essays on everything from art and celebrity to gay activism, Lorena Bobbitt to Bill and Hillary. These essays have never appeared in book form, and many will be appearing in print for the first time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679751205
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/11/1994
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A regular contributor to Salon.com, she is the author of Glittering Images; Break, Blow, Burn; Sexual Personae; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Vamps & Tramps.

Editorial Reviews

Either you like the polysexual, pagan Paglia, or you don't-and this collection by the author of Sexual Personae isn't going to change that. Perfectly aware of her image, Paglia early on compares herself to Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, in her ``raging egomania and volatile comic personae tending toward the loopy.'' On this outing, Paglia revisits the same fire hydrants, sniffs the competition and then marks them once more as her own. Pornography continues to be great; Lacanians, bad; Freud, underrated; feminists, undersexed. Although her main essay ``No Law in the Arena,'' is not as solid as ``Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,'' the analysis of academe that anchored Sex, Art, and American Culture, many of her essays expand on her gritty common-sense understanding of the nasty realities of sex. Particularly good are ``Rebel Love: Homosexuality''; ``Lolita Unclothed'' and ``Woody Allen Agonistes.'' Paglia is at her bilious ad feminem best skewering one-time idol Susan Sontag in ``Sontag, Bloody Sontag,'' or Catharine MacKinnon (``the dull instincts and tastes of a bureaucrat'') and Andrea Dworkin (``The Girl with the Eternal Cold'') in ``The Return of Carry Nation.'' As usual, there's much about tabloid icons-Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbit, Jackie O-but Paglia herself has become just such an icon, appearing in movies and TV specials whose transcripts she rather tediously includes. Still, when Paglia is good, she is palatable; when Paglia is bad, she's terrific. Author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Only five "new essays" appear in this second collection from Paglia (Sex, Art, and American Culture, LJ 10/1/92), a hodgepodge of book reviews, television and film scripts, previously published articles, excerpted transcripts to television talk shows and interviews, and other bits and pieces, accompanied by an inventory of press mentions and cartoons offered to document her celebrity. Paglia's overheated expostulations against censorship, "Stalinist feminists," and other bugbears of political correctness are interspersed with fierce arguments in favor of sexual license. Commenting on pop culture, she expounds her libertarian view, rejecting state regulation of abortion, prostitution, sodomy, drug use, and pornography, disdaining state "social-welfare meddling in public education" and "rigid antimale feminist ideology." For Paglia fans.-Cynthia Harrison, Federal Judicial Ctr., Washington, D.C.

Library Journal