Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf

by Camille Paglia

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Criticism, History, Politics

74 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Camille Anna Paglia is an American social critic, author and teacher. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, became a bestseller. She is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."

Reviews

[Vatikanska Milosnica · Rating 4 out of 5]

almost impossible to agree with every single thing, but in scope, in bitchiness, in resources, in ethical zeal, in manichaean moral panic, in mastery of the rhythms of english prose, in pro-americanism (she's the only one who can sell it to me), in malicious sweeping generalizations that somehow manage to be accurate, in cunty verbal BULLYING — this is classic fiery camille

[xyron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course Halperin is ridiculous and Foucault is overrated, but Freud is outdated and Paglia's defense of capitalism looks equally harebrained, bizarre and embarrassing, especially considering the earlier criticism of the politicized Halperin and Winkler - there is no equality in capitalism, you can't talk about feminist and rainbow capitalism seriously.
The post-war tyranny of "publish or perish" will end when the capitalist emphasis on quantity over quality ends, my dear prof. Camille Paglia, and when people like you stop defending capitalism.

[Jeremy Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dazzling. I realized I needed to read some Paglia, and I found this essay online. I am cheating a bit - this is an essay, not a book - but I've reviewed shorter books here on Goodreads, and longer ones that were less dense with literary and academic references, with less insight.

Paglia is renowned as a critic, and, shamefully, I had not realized just how much knowledge is required to critique the humanities. As Paglia notes, one can specialize profitably in the study of, say, mollusks, but to specialize in the humanities is to cut oneself off from the very knowledge necessary to excel as an academic in the humanities.

"Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" has nothing to do with Wall Street - Paglia is reviewing books, specifically by David M. Halperin - "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality" - and John J. Winkler's "The Constraints of Desire". These disciples of Foucault - who seems to be the 'real' subject of these reviews - are the 'corporate raiders', their work the 'junk bonds'.

Foucault takes a bashing, and I wish I'd read this before I studied the man at university - or, at least, alongside the man. Published in 1991, Paglia nearly predicts the state of academia today, insular, derivative, politicized, solipsistic, and rightly lambasts Foucault and his followers for accelerating the activist turn away from scholarship.

French theory is 'brand name consumerism', to Paglia - trendy, careerist, ahistorical, empty.

Halperin gets a good bashing as well - Winkler at least has some merit to Paglia - but the genius of these 50+ pages lies not in minor works of early 90s academia, but in Paglia's critique of the American, and global, academe.

Her critiques resonate loudly today. Her solutions, placing academic understanding on the history of human knowledge front and centre, still apply, 35 years later.

And the language? This is heated, 60s-inspired rhetoric, to be sure. But such fun! Paglia's style alone shames the academics she disdains.

It is a little tragic to see that Paglia was both so correct and also so unable to change the course of the academic Titanic.

But this still blew me away. Recommended to anyone looking for an early-90s radical takedown of academic BS, or a port of entry into Paglia's work. This isn't an easy read - dense with literary, academic and philosophical references, dense with dazzling language - but it sure is a worthwhile endeavor.

[Alec Bruce]

Academia has been fisted by Foucault.