Lessons from the Doctor of Irony: A Reflection on Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men

Abstract:Donna Zuckerberg’s recent book exposes the dark subculture of modern pickup artists (PUAs), who brag about making Ovid their master and mining his Ars Amatoria for seduction strategies. The present article shows three ways in which PUAs exemplify the very kinds of misreading Ovid warns about: not really reading at all, projecting one’s own obsessions onto the text, and failing to recognize a bogus teacher. It suggests that a crucial defense against such “textual abuse”—and an important tool for life in the modern world—is a lively awareness of irony, the realm in which Ovid indeed reigns supreme.