April 23, 2015

Went to see my student’s Undergraduate Research presentation on Tolkien. Preceding her was a Feminist reading of Ovid, looking to prove that The Metamorphoses was an intentional lamentation on the inequity of power. It was one of those scholarly essays whose erudition was pointless because the basic premise was nonsensical. The paper reached back in time to correct Ovid’s false notion of his own subject matter, and to reveal to him that he was really centrally concerned with the place of women in society. I asked the question, “Do you really think anyone in Ovid’s time would have read The Metamorphoses as a dissertation on power differential?” and her response was that Ovid was so great a poet that he wrote something that no one in his time could appreciate, patiently awaiting a time of enlightenment in which he could be properly understood.  I was a little ashamed of her adviser, but, of course, nothing could be said.  Advocate criticism such as Feminism or Queer Theory can never be really enlightening, as they seek to impose rather than to discover. They are not meant to be enlightening. They are meant to be gratifying.