DR. THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Of Camille Paglia’s first book, Sexual Personae, one could say that it showed a wider range of reading and interest than is typical of the other Yale PhD’s of her cohort who went into Professordom; and unlike the usual ismatic discourses of the feminist and deconstructive varieties it mainly avoided impenetrable prose and weird neologisms.  It treated sex differences as real and not as abstractions in a nominalist party-game.  Paglia’s thesis was risibly reductive – every literary phenomenon could be explained as a sexual charade.  Although Paglia is lesbian, her style of thinking has always struck me as being closer to that of a male homosexual of the campy-vampy species, several of whom I have known.  She is something of an exhibitionist.  As many have written, Sexual Personae began as a formless dissertation and only eventually became a slightly less formless book.  MTV hyped it.  It was a big “media success.”  Paglia’s subsequent books were cobbled together from journal-pieces and reviews and were forgotten six months after they were published.  Like many people who have enjoyed the limelight briefly, Paglia has spent the last two decades trying to steal her way back into stellar luminosity.  However, Sexual Personae is probably the sole academic book published in the early 1990s that anyone remembers.  The rest of them – and academic publishing pulps whole forests annually – sit gathering dust in university research libraries or have been recycled, deservedly, as more useful kinds of paper.

University life, no less than Hollywood life, has been based for decades, not only on the utterly puritanical code of political correctness, but also paradoxically on the Star System.  During the six years that I spent completing my master’s degree and then earning my doctorate in Comparative Literature at UCLA, there were at least three waves of “stardom” in the world of literary studies.  But the books we read in the “theory” seminars you couldn’t sell on Amazon today except in the penny-per-item category where the seller earns a small return on the shipping fee.  Like twenty-something starlets and the latest model sedan, those “groundbreaking” tomes have vanished into oblivion.  I dump lots of old books on the shelves in my office.  Recently, in a fit of curiosity, I picked up a title by J. Hillis Miller, who boldly deconstructed William Wordsworth, as no man had deconstructed him before, in a book called Words Wish Worth Wordsworth, which on re-inspection turned out to be quite as unreadable as I had remembered.  But in 1984, Miller was a star.

University life, no less than Hollywood life, is dominated by narcissism and vanity, and those traits are amplified by a regime of affirmative-action hiring that produces massively debilitating suspicions of inadequacy in its beneficiaries, especially in the humanities.

I try to order books from Dover, whose out-of-copyright policy means that its catalogue comes from the late Nineteenth Century and the first half of the Twentieth Century.

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