Kenneth J. Dover (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) |
You have shock jocks like Dice and Howard Stern. But someone
named K.J. Dover an Oxford classicist who wrote Greek Homosexuality may have been the ultimate intellectual shock
jock. In a review of a newly released edition of the tome by the deceased
academic in the TLS (“Textual
Orientation,” 7/27/16) Tim Whitmarsh says, “Philosophically he was what you
might call a fundamentalist realist. He believed that most people grope their
way through life myopically, shielded from the truth by a fug of ignorance,
pusillanimity and squeamishness, and it is the duty of the academic—and
specifically the philologist—to confront reality.” Whitmarsh goes on to explain
how this epistemology led Dover to undertake his magnum opus and quotes the author thusly, “I am fortunate in not experiencing moral shock or disgust
at any genital act whatsoever, provided that it is welcome and agreeable to all
the particpants.” One wonders what Dover thought of fist fucking or the use of
broomsticks and other objects that may insult the anus. But you have to
appreciate his no holds (or holes?) barred scholarship at a time when academic
is so oppressed by Orwellian “newspeak.” What would Dover have said to students
who found Sophocles Oedipus Rex
triggering? What is even more interesting about Dover is that he seemed to
subscribe to Flaubert’s dictum, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a
bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Whitmarsh
remarks that rather than being some kind of campus hellion or gaining a
reputation for upholding the legacy of crossing the aisles (sexually that is)
like the Bloomsburyites, “he was married to one woman for sixty-three years”
and “was an establishment man, and a
traditional classicist of the most conservative type.” No doubt about it Dover,
who died in 2010, was a really cool guy.
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