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’Restless’: Paglia v SontagMelissa Jane Hardie aa English Department , University of SydneyPublished online: 16 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Melissa Jane Hardie (1997) ’Restless’: Paglia v Sontag, Australian FeministStudies, 12:26, 217-225, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1997.9994861

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Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 12, No. 26, 1997 217

'Restless': Paglia v Sontag

MELISSA JANE HARDIE

Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.1

[E]very ambivalent identification with another self, writer or reader, parent orchild, is an agon that makes ghostlier die demarcations between self and other.2

The Soap

According to Joy Davidson, the 'Soap Opera Syndrome' is a habit amongst women of

extract [ing] excitement from their turbulent relationships with lovers, family,friends, and coworkers ... out of a restrained or severely misdirected, but essentiallyhealthy, drive for the heightened stimulation that could be wrung from these entangle-ments.3

She writes:

The lives of many drama-seeking women resemble soaps. In fact, the essentialcomponents of the soap opera are identical to three features of dramaticsensation-seeking: relationship orientation, emotional conflict and episodic living ... thesoap opera both imitates and creates a world in which emotional turbulenceoccupies a central place.4

For Davidson, this slippery mimesis is agonising; her book, The Soap Opera Syndrome, wascalled The Agony of it All in hardcover. Agony is generated not merely by the inscriptionof melodrama within the everyday lives of women, but by precisely this incontinenceof imitation and creation: an agon of competing regimes of identification. Davidson tiesthe 'soap opera syndrome' to a structure of identification among sensation seekers,borrowing from Ien Ang her analysis of melodrama's 'tragic structure of feeling':5

I know very few women who haven't been smitten with soap-opera fever atsome point. I once discovered that my most esteemed psychology professorcould be found at midday—every day—in front of the tube, lost in 'The Youngand the Restless' and 'As the World Turns'. I realised that if such a studiouswoman could become hooked on soaps, they must offer something quitespecial.6

The scene of the pedagogue eyeballing the tube speaks to the unseemly reach of soapopera. Quite special, and yet not special enough, the 'studious' professor, 'smitten with

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218 M.J. Hardie

soap-opera fever', signifies not only the practice of habitual study, but also its antithesis.Soap watching becomes a pedagogical perversion of the site of teaching; the professor atthe tube is learning rather than teaching, or rather teaching by exemplification,collapsing a discourse of extreme—the antipodean relation of university and soap—withone of exemplarity; the 'quintessential' teaching soap watcher. How does the extremeexample of the smitten pedagogue help to generate the model of a quintessential ortypical soap watcher? How does a deviation come to signify a commonplace? Throughwhat slippery mimesis does a commonplace—the smitten viewer in love with hertext—become a figure for the extreme, 'the agony of it all'?

The 'soap opera syndrome' could be read simply as an unlikely—because ostensiblypopulai—redaction of Meaghan Morris' analysis of banality and catastrophe in culturalstudies; in particular, it might be read as an intriguing displacement of Morris' critiqueof the solipsistic reversibility of the banality and catastrophe in Baudrillard. Sufferers ofthe soap opera syndrome share with Baudrillard an imperfect analysis of die catastrophiceveryday; they misread soaps through a

logic of mutual contamination ... the supereventfulness of the event approachesthe uneventfulness of absolute inertia, and we begin to live everyday catas-trophe as an endless dead point, or a perpetual freeze frame.7

The mutual contamination of text and life is phrased as an oxymoronic contaminationof movement with inertia, though life and text are never simply collapsed with those twoterms. The eventful inertia of the soap opera syndrome is cognate with not merely theacademic glued to the screen, but the inert screen itself; 'freeze frame' signifies, in soapopera, precisely the point of interruption or extra-diegetic movement—the introductionof the commercial, or the end of the episode.

Writing of that arrest which typifies suspense in soap opera narratives, Ang notes:

The last shot of an episode is then nearly always a close-up of the face of thecharacter concerned, which emphasises the psychological conflict she or he isin. In one of the following episodes—it does not necessarily need to be the verynext one—we are then shown how she or he handles the conflict, butmeanwhile time proceeds and life goes on as normal.8

Arrested conflict is a curious formulation of agony, oedipal in its reach, which derives itsmeaning from the eventfulness of certain kinds of affect: agony as the contest of feelingsthat produce physical action, 'a paroxysm of grief (OED).

The stationary, agonised viewer, though, locates another formulation of the popular:the model of die popular as the domain of distraction. Morris writes:

There are many versions of a 'distraction' model available in cultural studiestoday: there are housewives phasing in and out of TV or flipping throughmagazines in laundromats as well as pop intellectuals playing with quotes.9

In The Soap Opera Syndrome, the correlative of distraction may be suggested by the idea of'episodic living'. The 'episodic living' of the sufferer of soap opera syndrome maps ontothe episodic structure of serial television, though not onto the fidelity of the watcher'shabit. Davidson sees frequent channel switching as a sign of the 'sensation seeker';10 thepicnolepsy that characterises Virilio's analysis of micronarratives returns as a pathologyof feminine incontinence. Who could be less distracted, though, than the adherent of thesoap? Adhesion, the power of genres to 'fix' themselves to viewers, or the affect whichcements an identification between viewer and genre, replaces the logic of the domain of

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'Restless': Paglia v Sontag 219

distraction with a grammar of fidelity, and the premise of arrested development with apractice of endurance, continuity, and meta-diegetic stability.

One of the salient aspects of Davidson's esteemed professor is that she apparentlyinsists on watching in real time, rather than taping her program. A sign of connoisseur-ship amongst soap adherents, the fetishised moment of the 'real time' of soap trans-mission can be contrasted with the discursive construction of video culture as one ofrewinding and revival. The 'real time' of transmission exists as a discursive effect at leastpartly because of what Ang, after Geraghty, calls the experience of 'unchronicledgrowth':

'The characters in a serial, when abandoned at the end of an episode, pursuean "unrecorded existence" until the next one begins', states Christine Ger-aghty, in a summary of the formal characteristics of the television serial. Thetelevision serial thus appeals to a historical sense of time: it constructs thefeeling that the lives of the characters go on during our absence—i.e. betweentwo episodes. Thus the idea of 'unchronicled growth' is aroused in viewers.11

If the sense of 'unchronicled growth' contributes to the meaning of watching in real, i.e.broadcast, time, can it also be a symptom not only of the sufferer, but also the student,of the soap opera syndrome? Is Davidson guilty of the syndrome herself when sheremarks upon those stretches of time in which her professor is professionally unavailable,watching her soap—guilty of reading her mentor as the character in a pedagogical soapsyndrome? What is the meaning of this 'unrecorded existence'?

Soap opera moves from being an analogy to a cause: the agony of a life that followsthe patterns of a soap is displaced onto the patterns of soap opera viewing itself. And theprimal scene of viewing becomes the oblique seat of affect in this new exchange. If theargument of The Soap Opera Syndrome starts off as 'some women can't tell the differencebetween soaps and their own lives', the argument turns to 'some women can't tell thedifference between the way they feel about their lives and the ways they watch theirsoaps'. The professor is smitten; the smit replaces 'esteem' as the affective index of thepedagogical exchange. Some women—academics—can't tell the difference between theirlife and their soap watching.

Repetition—of the episode, the serial—may be a sign of movement, but equally asymptom of the failure to move (see Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, where 'tubal' therapyis given to the unregenerate and distracted leftovers of the 1960s, 'smitten' by sitcoms).Morris reminds us of the implications of the analysis of distraction, when she notes that:

One could claim that this interpretation is possible only if one continues toassume that the academic traditions of 'contemplation' really do define intelli-gence, and that to be 'distracted' can therefore only mean being dopey. Iwould reply that as long as we accept to restate the alternatives in those terms,that is precisely the assumption we continue to recycle.12

Instead, she suggests a reorientation to the 'analytical scene', reading de Certeau toquestion what becomes proper to the academic place of knowledge by considering itsexclusions, and yet wary of the tendency of analyses 'to reinscribe alienation from everydaylife as a constitutive rather than contingent feature of the scholar's enunciative prac-tice'.13

My title, 'restless', attempts to describe the soap opera syndrome as a particularpedagogical affect. If Davidson wants to signal one inversion by describing the professorsmitten by television, I want to employ it in an antithetical, though complementary,move, that I want to call agonistic, or 'argumentative'. Davidson's invocation of her

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220 M.J. Hardie

professor works as an offhand credential for the erstwhile pop psychologist. If popularpsychology is itself a kind of informal pedagogy, the formulaic esteem offered byDavidson to her professor is a scenario of textual consumption which displaces thetransferred affect of her readers from the soap, back to Davidson.

But I want to use the model of the immobile academic soap addict to raise anotherquestion about the soap opera syndrome, and that is to pursue Davidson's argument intoprecisely that pedagogical domain both off limits to, and argumentatively predicative forher argument—the academic domain: who are the restless soap opera syndromers inacademia, and what is their 'restrained or severely misdirected, but essentially healthy, drive

for... heightened stimulation'^ doing to us?

The Academic

Compare Davidson's professor and Camille Paglia, quoted in Soap Opera Digest

The machine-gun-mouthed author explains, 'I have been watching Y&R [TheYoung and the Restless] since day one. My family's soap is AS THE WORLDTURNS. They're fascinated by it, and that's my second favorite. But myparticular hobby horse is Y&R. It's the most fundamental soap ... To me,soaps are about psychology. You learn a thousand times more about relation-ships on soaps. The feminist establishment is totally out of touch withreality' ... 'Soaps are not a story; diey're reality', she says. 'We know they'refiction, but the actors become so known to us, they're real. I feel so tied intothe shopping mall culture. What happens to an actor on ATWT [As the WorldTurns] is more important to me than what happens to a French theorist thateveryone gets down on their knees to'. Paglia teaches in the morning atPhiladelphia's University of the Arts and races home to watch Y&R. 'It's oneof the great sources of continuity in my life', she says. 'It's the steadiestgirlfriend I've had'.15

Paglia's favourites are the same soaps as Davidson's professor, The Young and the Restlessand As the World Turns. like Davidson's professor, she watches in real time, executing ahasty retreat from campus to do so. Between As the World Turns and The Young and theRestless Paglia charts her own differentiation from a familial context for soap watching:li As the World Turns is the family soap, The Young and the Restless is ground zero for Paglia'sown soap romance. Paglia tropes her relationship to the soap as a sexual one, punningon the steady as both that which is always the same, and as that curiously unlocatablerelationship neither contractual nor casual, which features so often in soap opera. Hersoap watching is the 'unrecorded existence' of the agonised academic.

Davidson's curiosity about her esteemed professor offers in reverse the problematicMorris addresses to cultural studies in its evidencing of the banal: what does it mean,here, for the analyst of distraction to evidence the contemplative academic? This paperpursues the figure of the academic, alienated not from everyday life, but alienated fromthe place of the academy. Paglia's extra-academic career offers one model of theacademic whose contemplative practices (to use Morris' word) exceed the domain of theacademy. Paglia offers a surplus of extra-academic labour.

For Davidson, the phrase, 'the agony of it all' can serve as a mnemonic:

If in the midst of the excitement, intensity, and excessive nature of a dramaticepisode, you can hear yourself silently cry, 'Oh, the agony of it all'—if you can

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'Restless': Paglia v Sontag 221

just tickle your mind with that thought—you will have stepped outside yourmelodrama and will no longer be submerged in it.16

In other words, irony is the means by which women can extract themselves from theiragony. Ironic distance, internalised and self-generated—the tickle to the head—wouldseem a figuratively disastrous strategy of self-differentiation and foregrounding. Davidsonlocates an ironic surplus between women and their lives, whilst ignoring, or discounting,the potential for irony already implicit in the position of the soap addict. Ien Ang, inWatching Dallas, suggests one of the ways in which women watchers of Dallas werecrucially misinterpreted was through the academic supposition that they were sufferingfrom precisely this incapacity for irony in their viewing habits.17

Irony as a strategy offers the position of the pedagogue as the ironic antithesis of thesoap watcher, as, according to Davidson, we 'learn to step outside of melodrama' by'tickling' our 'mind'. Davidson's mixed metaphor symptomarically includes a rhetoric ofinside/out as one which evacuates soap opera of its pedagogical function. To graft theironic potential of the soap addict within the pathology of the syndrome would becontradictory for Davidson, whose text ultimately promises a pathology of soap watching,and thus cannot rescript a profitable habit of consumption.

For Paglia, soaps occupy the same territory as that to which Meaghan Morrisassigns the anecdote: for her, they are 'not expressions of personal experience butallegorical expositions of a model of the way the world can be said to be working'.18

Paglia, according to Davidson's logic though, makes the same mistake as the benightedsufferer of the syndrome: for her, 'not a story', soaps are 'reality'; in so readingthem though, she shares with Davidson an orientation towards soap which articulatesprofessional practice with the informal study of psychology. To figure an alreadyironic addict suggests instead another valency of Davidson's figure of the head-tickle.Camille Paglia, instead, sees the popular already internal to pedagogy—in the head ofacademia.

The Young and the Restless, first broadcast in 1973, was designed to reorient soap subjectmatter from the middle-aged to the young: its subjects were young and restless.Increasingly, however, young and restless began to operate not as a collocative set, butas a conjugation: as the young soap becomes a 'classic',19 it pits the young against therestless: a class of character who has literally grown into middle age or beyond on theshow, or else watching the show. Patricia Mellencamp, for example, narrates the familiarprocess of ageing mirrored by the soap. She refers to the dowager of The Young and theRestless, Catherine Chancellor, as her 'friend'20 as she relates (as a Morris style anecdote)the show's decision to broadcast the face lift and recuperation of the actress who playsKatherine, choosing to incorporate her facelift as Katherine's. Mellencamp records therelief of viewers that, at the end of this gruesome process (which she taped), Katherinestill looked old,21 as if she failed to erase the steadiness of the viewers of the show througha cosmetic intervention.

Mellencamp's anecdote of the dowager's ineffectual facelift locates her own 'soapopera syndrome' as one which inscribes itself within the ageing of the show. Paglia'sfavourite character is Jill Foster Abbott, Katherine Chancellor's ex-beautician (!) andpretender to Katherine's role. If Katherine stays old, despite surgery, Jill is forever young,being played by a succession of younger actresses since she first appeared. For Paglia, theposition of the feisty pretender or agonist, no longer young but always restless, describesher own agony: not the agony of the weak indeed, but the agonism of the agon: 'a verbalcontest or dispute'; an agonism: 'a combat, an athletic match' (OED). For Paglia, agony

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returns as agonistic, 'polemic combative striving to overcome in argument, deriving froma sense of athletic contest'.

Paglia's practice of academia as soap opera is one way to think about her extra-ordinary career as a pundit. In particular, it was manifest in her work as an agony auntfor the magazine Spy. The agony aunt, the irregular pedagogue of the marketplace, opensher head to the advertisement of affect in the popular press. As the antithesis ofDavidson's pop psychology, Paglia's column exhorted her readers to watch The Young andthe Restless. When 'Anguished in Oregon', for example, writes to Paglia of his/her'lingering feelings of guilt' in watching television, Paglia responds:

I prescribe a daily dose of my favourite soap, The Young and the Restless. Whatmetaphysical anxiety could survive the soothing presence of plucky Nikki,trampyjill, and teen queen Christine?

Soap 'soothes' rather than agonises; just as her advice is the opposite of Davidson's, sotoo is her understanding of the ratio of reversibility between soap opera agony andviewer pleasure. More surprisingly, Paglia's work has made its appearance on the show,as the reading material of choice of one of its more recent characters, Phyllis, whobrandishes her copy of Vamps and Tramps.

The Agony of it All

If Paglia offers a surplus of extra-academic labour to the venues of popular culture, SusanSontag's career as independent thinker, one for whom the space outside of the academyprovided the most enduring space of academic location, is above all an intellectualpractice of high modern contemplation situated elsewhere from both the academy andpopular culture. In revisiting the scenes of their encounter, I hope to reanimate thebanality of the soap opera syndrome. Paglia's fidelity to television figures one of her mostpersistent self-advertisements as the rogue representative of a marriage of popular cultureand intellectual practice, fused in the 1960s, but betrayed by its adherents ... Inparticular, Paglia scorns the subsequent history of Susan Sontag, as the dissoluteonce-avatar of the popular in academia, and Paglia's own precursor: relating herconversation with Sontag in the 1970s, Paglia writes:

I wanted to say, 'I'm your successor, dammit, and you don't have die wit torealise it!' It was All about Eve, and Sontag was Margot Channing stalked bythe new girl.24

Although she explicitly refers to camp Hollywood here, Paglia's debunking of Sontag ispure soap pedagogy: her article, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', stages the agonistic relationsbetween die two as a soap-style cat fight between the incumbent and the wannabe:Katherine and Jill. For Paglia, Sontag's failings are essentially two: she doesn't own atelevision (and thus fails the demands of popular culture), and she never engagedacademia:

Sontag's separation from the university weakened her work over the longhaul ... Sontag's calculated veering away from popular culture is my gravestcharge against her. When in a 1988 profile in Time magazine, she denied shehad ever been interested in pop ... and boasts that she did not even own atelevision set, I was appalled and disgusted.20

In Paglia's soap opera pedagogy, television and academia provide the intellectualacumen of the agonist or contestant. For Paglia, academic training is the virtu of the

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'Restless': Paglia v Sontag 223

agonist as a kind of athleticism. Sontag loses both the academic contest and theextra-curricular battle. Each provides a syntax for agony as an affect of rhetorical andphysical conversion: conversion of the place of learning and the conversion of the steadystate to the dynamic exchange.

Sontag, elsewhere called by Paglia a 'morose somnambule',26 represents (against herown inclination) the zone of the everyday, of mass culture, as the domain of anold-fashioned banal catastrophe. In Sontag's case, it is a mordant leftover of avant-gardemodernism, but it nonetheless maps onto both the banal everyday of Baudrillard afterMorris, and Davidson's prognosis of the Soap Opera Syndrome:

Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now' but 'Apoca-lypse from Now On'. Apocalypse has become an event that is happening andnot happening ... this is a catastrophe in slow motion.27

A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms ... and it doesn't occur.And it still looms. We seem to be in the throes of one of the modern kinds ofapocalypse.28

The permanently imminent catastrophe, after all, is precisely what Davidson wants toarm her soap watching women against:

because this kind of drama demands that we remain on guard against the nextcatastrophe, we also trap ourselves in a world where peace of mind does notexist.29

In 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', Paglia narrates Sontag's failures through the extendedanecdote of a lecture by Sontag at Bennington sponsored by Paglia soon after she wasappointed to her first position there in 1973. It was an event so unsuccessful, though abanal catastrophe, that Paglia 'had to endure a chorus of derision'.30 The chorus ofderision announces the cost of Paglia's agonistic staging of the Sontag event, an eventwhich she restages after the publication of Sexual Personae in 1990, claiming, in Vanity Fair,'I've been chasing that bitch for twenty-five years, and I've finally passed her!'.31 Here,soap opera logic takes over in an agonised contest familiar to Paglia both from her yearsas a soap fan, and also from her mentor and thesis adviser, Harold Bloom.

In textual studies, Harold Bloom is the formidable critic of agonism as a practice ofpoetic and critical succession. According to Paglia, he wrote 'Mere Sontagisme!'32 in themargins of the work that through the 1970s and 1980s morphed into Sexual Personae.Bloom, put crudely, argues that poetic succession proceeds through the crucial misread-ing of a precursor, a misreading that locates the incompletion of a precursor's project,and thus the completion of the project by the agonistic, misreading successor: 'Strongcriticism, like strong poetry, usurps, and this usurpation always begins by the appropri-ation of what is then available in language'.33 The passage of time from Sontag's deliveryof a lacklustre performance at Bennington, to Paglia's hilarious retelling of that story in'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', charts the progression of Paglia's own career, full of 'relationshiporientation, emotional conflict, and episodic living'.3* Bloom writes:

Memory, according to Freud, holds on to the image of [the primal scene] untilthe child, between the ages of three and five, creates the Primal Scene fantasy,which is an Oedipal reverie ... the 'oral' scene is the topos or Primal Sceneproper, the negative moment of being influenced, a perpetually lost origin,while the 'written' scene is the trope or Primal Scene fantasy. This means, inmy terms, that in a poem a topos or rhetorical commonplace is where somethingcan be known, but a trope or inventive turning is when something is desired or

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ivilled ... As a Primal Scene, the Scene of Instruction is a Scene of Voicing; onlywhen fantasized or troped does it become a Scene of Writing.35

Negotiating the self-misrecognition that her identification with Sontag initiates, Pagliaintroduces her writing up of the episode with another anecdote, one that seems to makeno sense:

When I was in junior high school, Women's Day magazine, to which my mothersubscribed, published a satirical memoir of a woman's disconcerting chanceencounters with several famous people. My favorite was her adventure in aladies room with Tallulah Bankhead, who mistook her for an old friend anddelivered a long monologue from inside the toilet stall. A cartoon showed afur-clad Tallulah hanging over the saloonlike swinging door and gesturinglanguidly at the stunned but fascinated writer, who never did get a word inedgewise.

I guess Susan Sontag is my Tallulah.36

Paglia's scene of misrecognition rereads the error of Sontag's paper—the error ofSontag—as an error in audience: the isolation of the toilet cubicle, neither academy norlounge room, generates an unsolicited intimacy from the 'unchronicled existence' (toreturn to Geraghty's term) of the star. The toilet stall disguises the immobile auditor.Paglia introduces her historical account of Sontag's speech through this displacednarrative of maternal instruction, one which locates the misreading as Sontag/Tallulah's,whilst putting into place the ground for her own agonistic appraisal of her precursor, andher own succession. Locked in her cubicle, without TV, Sontag/Talullah can neverknow 'the agony of it all'. As I have argued elsewhere, the toilet stall, long associated withmasculine sexual exchange, has a pronounced currency as the site of feminine exchangeas well in a key number of camp texts: most memorably, the famous wig flushing scenein Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls?1 Paglia analogises her feud with Sontag toSusann's with Capote, seeing in it a revival of the literary feud as an effect of theexchange between elite and popular culture.38 Tallulah/Sontag, immobile like thesoap-smitten academic, crucially misreads the agonistic challenge the anecdote an-nounces, fatally preventing (in the cartoon) the successor to respond, to speak, to 'correct'the precursor. Stumbling into the toilet as witness to a transaction that would normallybe private, the agonistic successor is witness to their own primal scene, one which canonly be rehearsed, in Bloom's terms, to reconstruct the will of the agonist. In rehearsingher chance encounter with Sontag in the toilet, Paglia offers a novel configuration of thebanal and catastrophic; her rehearsal of the story initiates the conversion from topos totrope, or from exemplarity to extremity, that I spoke of in the figure of the soap lovingacademic, the misreading afficionado of agony.

NOTES

1. Susan Sontag, The Benefactor (Panther) London, 1966, p. 11.2. Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (University of Chicago Press) Chicago and London, 1982, p. 67.3. Joy Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome: The Drive for Drama and Excitement in Women's Lives (Berkeley) New

York, 1991, p. 12.4. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, pp. 63-4.5. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, p. 65.6. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, p. 64.7. Meaghan Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies' in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television: Essay in

Cultural Criticism (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1990, p. 19.

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'Restless': Paglia v Sontag 225

8. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, trans. Delia Couling (Methuen)London and New York, 1982, p. 53.

9. Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies', p. 24.10. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, p. 48.11. Ang, Watching Dallas, pp. 53-4.12. Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies', p. 24.13. Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies', p. 37.14. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, p. 12.15. Robert Rorke, 'The Young and the Literate', Soap Opera Digest, vol. 18, no. 8, 13 April 1993, p. 66.16. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, p. 37.17. Ang, Watching Dallas, p. 119.18. Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies', p. 15.19. Carolyn Hinsey, 'Young & Restless Cleans Up as the Classic Soap Opera', Soap Opera Digest, vol. 18,

no. 8, 13 April 1993, pp. 44-7.20. P. Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy (Indiana University Press) Bloomington

and Indianapolis, 1990, p. 291.21. Mellencamp, High Anxiety, p. 292.22. Rorke, 'The Young and the Literate', p. 66.23. Camille Paglia, 'Ask Camille Paglia', Vamps and Tramps (Vintage) New York, 1994, p. 401.24. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', Vamps and Tramps (Vintage) New York, 1994, p. 352.25. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', pp. 345-6.26. Paglia, 'The Artistic Dynamics of "Revival"', Vamps and Tramps (Vintage) New York, 1994, p. 341.27. Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (Allen Lane) Harmondsworth, 1989, p. 88.28. Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, p. 87.29. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, p. 20.30. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', p. 353.31. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', p. 355.32. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', p. 345.33. Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, p. 29.34. Davidson, The Soap Opera Syndrome, pp. 63-4.35. Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, pp. 60-1.36. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', p. 344.37. See my 'Loose Slots: Figuring the Strip in Showgirls', Xtext, no. 1, 1996, pp. 24-35.38. Paglia, 'Sontag, Bloody Sontag', p. 357.

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