Priscilla's Response

From English 194 Wiki

When McCarty applies his gathered ideas of modeling into his own project of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, he finds that after modeling all the instances of personification in the poem, there are still several questions that can follow. He states that with this poem, “we are compelled to redefine the trope generally as a shift not merely to a human state but also towards it, however slight the change” (56). With this definition he creates a model of all the possible occurences of personification in Ovid's poem and actually results in demonstrating his argument that a model generates more questions. McCarty had suggested earlier that these questions can actually help improve the model, but with each manipulation done to the model, wouldn't more questions be produced? At what point would it actually finish? Within this last section of the chapter, McCarty points out that the production of these questions is not a “waste of time, as long as good questions come of it” (64). What would then constitute as a “good question”? I would assume that a "good question" is a question which can actually improve the model, but besides the improvement to the model, is there anything else that can occur from formulating a “good question”? Would there be a better understanding of a literary work as it was in McCarty’s case for Metamorphosis?