Catherine Nicholson in New York Review of Books:
Nan Z. Da spent the first six and a half years of her life in the People’s Republic of China. She was born in the 1980s, during a period known as Gaige Kaifang, the “Reform and Opening-Up,” a time of political reorganization and economic liberalization undertaken in the long shadow of Mao’s dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution. Her family left China for the United States when she was a child, and she is now a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. But of late she has undergone an uncanny reversion: “For more than six years I have taught Shakespeare’s King Lear, a piece of literature far outside my field, in a class that introduces students to the history and praxis of literary criticism.” Da added Lear to her syllabus, she says, “because it fast-tracks students to the hardest parts of literature and literary criticism”—close reading, textual bibliography, theater history, genre theory. It is plot-heavy, overburdened with detail, and careless of minor characters, and so it “places a great strain on interpretive validity, on accurate assessment and recall.” (Pop quiz: Who is Curan? How many people meet at Dover, or hide in trees? What happens to the King of France?) But Da’s reasons for assigning the play were also personal: “In my mind I was drawing a long and elaborate analogy.”
That analogy—“Lear, China, China, Lear”—forms the spine of Da’s new book, The Chinese Tragedy of “King Lear,” serving as axiom, intuition, experimental hypothesis, and knowing provocation. “Teachers of literature and criticism have to deal with bad analogies and allegoresis all the time,” Da observes. Shakespeareans in particular are well acquainted with the impulse to claim that the writer and his plays illuminate all manner of phenomena: modernity, Western civilization, “the human.” The impulse to analogize can generate fresh insights, but it can also efface what is urgently particular in a text, a time period, a cultural tradition, a historical crisis, a personal experience.
More here.
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