A few Thursdays ago, a good friend of mine sent me an articlefrom The New Yorker on the sexual assault case against Avital Ronell, one of Comparative Literature’s most influential scholars and a niche intellectual rock star. I had recently attended one of her three-day seminars and was in a class for which she was a one-time guest professor. To be honest, I don’t remember much about the seminar (it was about complaint, and she had talked a bit about Jean-Luc Nancy) or that one class she guest-lectured (during which we discussed Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy”). But I do remember how everybody was drawn to her, despite (or perhaps because of) how soft-spoken she was and how much space she didn’t take up (physically speaking, at least). Behind her innocuous demeanor was someone who I perceived as exceptionally creative and deeply erudite, whose thought process worked nothing like mine and who fascinated me endlessly. Her essay on “The Idiot Boy” read like the academic, scholarly vers...