A reader forwarded this notice of a Zoom lecture last week to me — alas, too late to sign up for it. My guess is that it’s batshit crazy identity politics stuff, but really, who can say for sure, as this notice is written in a language that seems like English, but was really generated by a lit-crit jargon bot. Can you imagine going to grad school in the Classics because you love Greco-Roman literature, and having that love beaten out of you by these ideologues?

UPDATE: A reader comments:

So, at some mild risk of revealing my identity to folks who may come here looking to denounce Rod/pick a fight over this…I was in attendance at this talk. The bulk of it was just as impenetrable as the abstract implies, but in the few moments Prof. Telo came up for air to state an actual thesis (largely in the Q & A period,) that thesis amounted to, “Aristophanes was probably a troglodyte, and any attempt to discern what he hoped to convey in these texts is useless at best, actively harmful at worst. However, if we subject his language to sufficiently esoteric High Theory, we can eventually get it to spit out things that will be useful to contemporary social justice activism. In fact, this is basically the only legitimate reason to study Classics.” Given that his mode of analysis was so contrived as to be incomprehensible, it struck me that you could get almost any predetermined, ideologically approved conclusion out of this kind of literary interpretation. In that sense it felt very Soviet; legitimate Classics is Classics which confirms the priors of the Revolution. Deeply narcissistic and decadent stuff. Also, the first time I’ve seen a self-confessed “cisgendered gay man” give himself a disclaimer for presuming to speak on trans issues.