Intersections Working Group: Nan Z. Da – ‘Lear and the Location of Literary Criticism’

Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Lear has been important to literary criticism, especially the contingent that worries about being wronged and about wronging others. It is in the discussion of Lear that the terms “data” and “critical data” show up in literary studies for the first time: “data” in an 1819 lecture by Samuel Coleridge and “critical data” in an influential 1987 essay by Stanley Cavell. Both critics saw in Lear an agonized relationship to the scientific method and other tenets of empiricism. Among other empirical difficulties, Lear successfully triggers the responses — such as over-identification, projection, transference, and punitiveness — that cause readers and playgoers to gravely misremember the plot and even stick with those mistakes. Lear is about this kind of vulnerability and has been probed for this vulnerability at least since Coleridge. No other work of literature has placed as much stress on interpretive validity. This talk will expand on the spot to which Lear pins literary criticism, the spot where data becomes inference, first described as significant and troublesome in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Nan Z. Da is an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins University Department of English. She taught at the University of Notre Dame for nine years in the departments of English and East Asian language and literatures before moving to Johns Hopkins.

Da’s teaching and scholarship cover 19th-century American and trans-Atlantic literature and letters, modern Chinese literature and letters, literary and social theory, and the intersection of literary studies and the data sciences. She is interested in empiricism and its difficult cases, the mechanisms of disambiguation, and the relationships between literature and complexity and parrhesia and literary criticism.

She has taught courses on American transcendentalism, 20th-century Chinese culture and history, literary and social theory, as well as traditional survey courses on 19th century American literature and world literature. This fall she will teach “Literary Studies as Data Science” and “Introduction to Literary Studies.”

With NYU Gallatin School for Individualized Study Associate Professor Andrea Gadberry, she edits the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press.