From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: She's baaaaack.....Camille Paglia
Date: 28 Sep 1992 18:07:43 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

In article <jyc.717723794@Leland>
jyc@leo.Stanford.EDU (Jon Corelis) writes:
| adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:
|
| > Do please let me know what a scholar's "vigorous political 
| > activism in the cause of antidiscrimination" has to do with
| > the quality of his work in Classics.
|
|   Please do let me know how someone who apparently knows English could
| have found any claim to the connection you suggest in what I wrote. 

I do so love a dare.  OK.

In article <1a81ioINNovv@lindy.Stanford.EDU>
jon@lindy.Stanford.EDU (Jon Corelis) wrote:

|   I think I may have more experience to base my opinions of Paglia on
| than many people who talk about her.  For instance, the article which
| catapulted her into celebrity when it appeared in the New York Times
| Book Review and subsequently was reprinted elsewhere actually consisted
| of brief excerpts from a much longer article which appeared in the
| scholarly journal Arion and which was a review of two books on the
| history of sexuality.  

The Arion article appeared *after* Paglia had hit the big time
with _Sexual Personae_. 

| I'm probably one of the few people around who read
| not only that original long article but also the two books of which it
| was a review.  

Yeah, well, I've read the review and both books too.  Perhaps these
books should be mentioned by name.  They are the late John J. Winkler's
_The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in
Ancient Greece_ and David Halperin's _One Hundred Years of Homosexuality:
And Other Essays on Greek Love_.  Winkler and Halperin are classicists
and both books are Foucauldian approaches to sexuality in ancient Greece.

So now we come to the sentence in question.

| Being familiar with the books and to some extent with the
| field, it was immediately apparent to me that Paglia's review was a
| piece of character assassination based on scholarly ignorance or, more
| often, deliberate distortion -- 

So far, so good. 

| a hatchet job which was not only
| mean-spirited but hypocritical, since the authors of the books in
| question (one of whom had died of AIDS shortly before Paglia's article
| was written and was thus beyond responding to her slurs) both had
| career-long records of vigorous political activism in the cause of
| antidiscrimination, whereas for all her pseudopopulist bluster Paglia's
| own real-world political credentials are, to the best of my knowledge,
| null.

I don't know how to read that to mean anything other than this: Paglia's
review of two books written by classicists about sexuality ancient Greece
was mean-spirited and hypocritical because Winkler and Halperin were
involved in political activism in the cause of antidiscrimination whereas
Paglia has no such political record.  I would like to know what possible
difference political activity has to do with one's reading of the Iliad
or ancient Greek dream books.  And, what's more, I'd like to know what
possible difference one's political activity has to do with one's reading 
of an academic's essay on the Iliad or ancient Greek dream books.  How does
Paglia's alleged non-involvement in political activism make her review of
Winkler and Halperin "hypocritical"? 

Arne

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